raised his hands and dropped them heavily to his sides. "I can't explain it otherwise." he said; "I am too slow with ny words. But that is how it is."

Though he could not explain. Maud understood, and in the midst of her tears she was angry with him for having put up her image so high that the first fall had shattered it to atoms. From an altar of reasonable height the idol could have fallen and only been bruised, but what woman that ever lived could hope to keep her balance on that preposterous pinnacle of perfection to which he had insisted on raising her, despite her own protest? Who could hope to exist at that giddy height? Well, it was over now; she would never be asked to stand there again. That "terrible faith" which had worried her so sorely was dead now, dead of a sudden death. It had not died in lingering torments, it had not languished through feverish stages to its end. All his great and beautiful faith had been killed by one mortal stab, struck at the very core of its being.

Through her tears Maud laughed fiercely to think what that stab had been; to think that Germaine, who was so far from recognising the height and the depth of her treason to him, who so completely missed the real point of her mercenary motive, should be lost to her through a simple lie, perhaps the most harmless lie that she had ever told in her life, and certainly the most clumsy. Such a lie might have been told by women of ten times her worth, and yet gone unpunished; it might almost have been told in the nursery, and have been amply atoned for by half an hour in a dark corner and to Maud it was to cost a life's happiness. It was ludicrous-like a

nan being hung for sheep-stealing after he had committed patricide. comfortably undetected. Oh, whimsical irony of fate!

Laughing and crying, she struggled against it, would not believe it would not be convinced. eyen when she heard him say good-bye, so hopelessly, so sadly, but without a shade of wavering. But when she looked up and saw that he had left her, then both her tears and her laugh stopped suddenly short. The word she had been addressing to him broke off, the hand she had stretched towards him, thinking he was still there, remained poised and rigid, like a hand of stone. In wide-eyed wonder she gazed at his retreating figure, and as she looked, tenderness was fast turning to anger, regret was changing to the rage of the woman who has plotted and finds herself baffled, who has humbled herself to the point of offering her love and sees it refused.

.

Until the bend of the road hid him she stood like a statue; then, and only then, did she finally understand that he was lost. With tight-set lips she turned her face back towards Floundershayle; all thoughts of her errand were swept out of her mind for the moment, as all thoughts of the post-office had apparently been swept out of his; for, instead of proceeding on their way, they had each instinctively turned to retrace their steps.

Maud was quite breathless when she reached the inn, though she had no particular cause for hurry

nothing to do when she got there, but to sit down and try to think over the situation as it now stood in this new and unexpected light. But fate had arranged quite otherwise. Fate. in the shape of the landlady, received her at the door with the announcement that a

gentleman had called to see her, and was at that moment waiting in the sitting-room, had in fact been there for quite half an hour. "Indeed," said Maud, indifferently; and without pausing to reflect upon who the visitor might be, or even to ascertain whether her hat was straight or not, she flung open the door of the sittingroom and immediately found herself face to face with Mr Carbury.

For a minute she gazed at him somewhat vacantly. He was so disconnected with her present thoughts that it almost cost her an effort to recognise him.

"What on earth- " she was beginning, then interrupted herself with a quick laugh. "Oh, I see, of course; I had forgotten; you have brought me the gloves, I suppose. This is indeed answering my letter by return of post!"

Mr Carbury had not brought the gloves, in fact he had forgotten all about them, but he had brought a piece of news. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the piece of news had brought him: its essence, at any rate, was the immediate cause of his presence here.

As usual, the crisis had come about casually. Mr Carbury, feeling desirous of a breath of air, and discovering that he had just time for a run round to his club before dinner, was much provoked at being brought up by the want of a button on his glove, and Williams chancing to be out, went off in anything but a serene humour in search of one of his sisters. It was extremely annoying of them not to have seen to it before. What was the good of having three sisters and a mother, and what was the good of their continually fussing over one's drawers and wardrobe if one's gloves were to be buttonless at the end of it?

Three meek, middle-aged heads were raised at his entrance, and three pairs of mild grey eyes anxiously sought his face. In this quiet little back-room, with its

plain furniture and its scantily decorated walls, he was greeted as a ray of sunshine might be greeted by a secluded flower-bed. To these three women he did indeed represent all the sunshine that ever shone upon their lives, not because he was warm or tender, or even particularly grateful, but because they had sacrificed everything to him, and he had been good enough to accept it; also, perhaps, because he was so tall and dark and so distinctly remarkable, while they were so small and colourless and so hopelessly insignificant. If such contrast in a family does not produce jealousy, it is pretty certain to produce blind adoration.

The glove being flung on the table, was immediately clutched at by three hands, and triumphantly secured by Miss Christina Carbury. Would he have it sewed on with black or white silk? He would have it sewed on with any colour of the rainbow, so long as it was done quick; he was suffocating in here; couldn't imagine how they could put up with gas; why didn't they burn candles? Much the pleasantest light. Because they liked gas, Miss Bessie Carbury unblushingly

asserted. Why should Launce be worried by being reminded that the number of wax candles weekly consumed in his room made it advisable to light the rest of the house on a more economical principle?

Miss Henrietta Carbury added that she hoped this much of the gas wouldn't give Launce a headache; was he quite sure he hadn't a headache already? He was looking rather pale. She had a bottle of smelling-salts here, perhaps

"Oh, hang it all!" said Carbury, with the laugh of a goaded man, as he violently backed before the scent - bottle. "Confound it!" came next, with a peculiarly brotherly growl, as, in his retreat, he stumbled over the skirt which Bessie Carbury was engaged in turning for her own winter use; for the Miss Carburys would have thought it wicked to indulge in a lady's-maid as long as there was Launce's valet to be provided for. Bessie was immediately covered with confusion and filled with remorse at her own awkwardness in having left the skirt to trail on the floor. Launce must excuse her stupidity, and he must on no account think of picking up the hooks and eyes which he had upset in his stumble. To grope about on the floor would only make him hot-would make his head ache worse than it did al ready. For Carbury, perhaps half ashamed of his ungracious gesture, had stooped down to remedy the evil he had occasioned. But it was waste of trouble. At sight of Launce on the floor, the three horrified Miss Carburys had already risen to their feet and precipitated themselves upon the hooks and eyes. Was it likely that they would allow him to take any trouble for them, considering that they had never consented to his taking any

trouble for himself? With a gesture, half impatience, half resignation, he stood up and walked away to the window. What was the use of fighting them about it? The hooks and eyes were not his; and besides, it certainly was true, as Bessie said, stooping did make him hot-it was a deuce of a bore. Better leave it to them; they seemed to like picking up hooks and eyes. This was the sort of thing that was always happening. Carbury's family life had been but a daily repetition of the hook-and-eye incident. And certainly, whether they liked it or not, there could be no doubt that it was no more than poetical jusice if the Miss Carburys were reduced to picking up their own hooks and eyes. That brother of theirs, of whom they were so proud, was a work of their own hands; it was they who had made him what he was-let them take the consequences.

"By the by, Launce," began Miss Christina hurriedly, as she regained her place and repossessed herself of the glove, "what did you think of the last telegrams from St Petersburg?" Not that Miss Christina Carbury cared at all about the telegrams from St Petersburg, but it was necessary to keep Launce in good humour until his glove was ready, and the St Petersburg telegrams would do as well as anything else.

“Haven't looked at the paper to-day," came sulkily from the window.

"Then you haven't seen about Miss Greeve's marriage," broke in Bessie, coming to Christina's rescue" (there's your thimble, Chrissy), nor about Captain Trayner's promotion ? It isn't an amusing paper," rambled on Bessie, whose interest in politics was considerably less keen than

her interest in her friends' doings, and to whom newspapers in general were simply birth, death, and marriage columns. "Scarcely a name one knows mentioned except those two."

"And Sir Peter Wyndhurst," added Henrietta. "I suppose it's the same one that Launce met in Scotland."

"What about him?" asked Carbury, sharply.

"Nothing about him; only something about his yacht, which he has had to bring into harbour for repairs, it seems, having encountered some heavy weather in the North Sea."

"What?" said Carbury, turning suddenly from the window.

"But there's nothing happened to the yacht, you know," Henrietta hastened to add, somewhat aghast at the effect of her announcement; indeed she had had no idea that Launce had been so fond of Sir Peter as to be agitated by the news of his yacht having been knocked about in the North Sea. yacht's quite safe in harbour." "Was that in this morning's paper?" asked Carbury, sternly. They hastened to assure him that it was.

"The

"And that means that Wyndhurst is in England now?"

They supposed that, according to logical deduction, it could mean nothing else.

"That'll do," he said in a choking voice, as he brushed past his astonished sisters to the door.

"And he's gone without his glove!" gasped Christina, putting in the final stitch just as the door closed.

Mr Carbury did not want his glove, for he did not go for his breath of air that night. He went straight back to his own room, and shut himself in there. It was a large and handsome

apartment, furnished with both taste and cost, well supplied with comfortable seats, hung with stamped leather, and adorned with valuable engravings. There was something suggestive about the medley of objects on all sides. Sometimes in the evening dusk, just before the candles were lit, they would seem to crowd about Carbury like shadows-the shadows of his old life. There were the engravings on the wall, telling how Laurence Carbury had once cared for art; the skins on the floor, telling how he had once cared for sport; the groups of strange, outlandish knick-knacks, proclaiming how he once cared for travel. There were fishing - rod cases, too, in the corners, and books upon the shelves; but there was dust upon them all, not merely the tangible, inevitable dust of the London day that was past, but a more suggestive and a more melancholy sort of dust, eloquent of dead pursuits that have been denied even the decency of burial, and are condemned to grow rusty and musty and mouldy upon their shelves and in their cases. If any one had taken the trouble to investigate, it would have been found that the joints of the fishing-rods had long ago forgotten how to fit into each other, and it would have been observed that the newest volume of fiction on the shelves bore a date' of ten years back.

This was the place where, when immoderately bored by family affection, Carbury could take refuge in luxurious solitude. Here also had he sat and brooded over his wrongs, nursing his wounded vanity in jealous seclusion, eating out his heart, away from the sight

of his fellow-men. Within these four walls, and these four last months, what wild thoughts had not crossed his mind; what frantic

plans of revenge had not been canvassed by his desperate brain; how had he not promised his writhing vanity that the wrong-doer should not go unhurt, much as a mother might promise her sick child that the naughty boy who gave him the slap should most certainly be whipped!

It was to this room, too, that he had come back with the news of Lord Kippendale's ruin fresh in his mind, and in that wellpadded chair he had thrown himself, setting his teeth, and asking himself why, in the name of everything that was reasonable, he should feel the smallest pain at the misfortune of people who had been the cause of misfortune to himself? Yet all the time, to his great annoyance, he was aware of a certain very faint, very undecided thrill of pity, which stirred uneasily within him.

upon

To understand what that moment of disillusionment in the Kippendale conservatory had been to Carbury, it is necessary to look back what his life had been before. For years before the day on which he met Lady Baby, the world of women had been to him as a labyrinth of scentless flowers, from which he had sucked tho honey long, long ago. He had arrived at that most hopeless point when a man recognises an old flame in every girl to whom he is introduced, by virtue of having flirted with her facsimile some dozen years before. Was there no refuge anywhere from this all-pervading weariness of the feminine element? Were there really nothing but beautiful and plain women in the world-clever and stupid ones? He was so tired of stupid women-but then he was so tired of clever ones!

Thus matters stood with him when he met Lady Baby, and, to his own amazement, perceived that

he could not pass her by as he had passed the others. Looking back later on that April evening in the green avenue at Kippendale when the bushes had rustled beside him, it seemed to him that the bare branches, parting to let her through, had blossomed out all at once into a rare and unexpected flower-one that in all his travels he had never found growing under any clime of the earth. He had thought that the world was empty; he had believed that his blunted senses were dead to all passion, that his heart was a piece of dry wood that could never put out shoots again: but now, first with incredulous wonder and soon with tremulous delight, he felt that in this dry wood the sap was still stirring, that something was moving, something was pushing its way out to the daylight -that, after all, he was not too old to love again :

"Kommst du noch einmal, Jugendzeit, Kommst du noch einmal, Liebe?" Yes, it was coming again; it was holding triumphal entrance into the poor egotist's tired-out heart. It was exactly because he knew himself to be an egotist that he grasped at this love as at the last possible escape from that stagnant swamp of self, self, self, against which occasionally, at very rare intervals, he had had the manliness to revolt, but never had possessed the energy to shake off.

And then had come Sir Peter's rivalry and the blow of the engagement. And after that Lady Baby's pressing invitation, and those intoxicating eight days at Kippendale, in which, from hour to hour, he grow more convinced that his love was returned. The rapture of the thought bewildered him, but also it softened him. Regrets stirred within him; shame crept over him at thought of his wasted