the
leafy chestnut trees.

"He is false," she said to herself, thinking of our hero who was
sleeping so soundly under the little roof in the valley. "He tried to
talk with me on the drive home as if nothing had happened. He is an
actor who plays at love, and his eyes and his tongue are under his
control as if he were the walking gentleman in the comedy, who kisses
the maid while he is waiting in the parlor for the mistress. He does not
love Margaret Windsor; he loves her father's stocks and bonds, and he
longs for riches, even with the encumbrance of a wife."

She smiled bitterly as she thought of the breaking up of her dream of
love, and she almost cursed the riches which had weighed her down and
had filled her with suspicion of all the men who had ever asked her hand
in marriage. She had thought that Geoffrey had been prevented from
asking for it two years before because he had felt that she was rich and
he was poor. When he had bade her farewell in Paris he had hesitated and
tried to say something to her, she remembered, but had compressed his
lips into a forced smile and taken his leave of her.

As she looked out the window she heard a rumble of wheels and saw the
phaeton rolling Mrs. Carey down to the station.

"What is that woman doing at this hour in the morning?" Maggie asked
herself, looking with hot, jealous eyes at the beauty as she sat back in
the phaeton. "It is dreadful to have such a person under one's roof. I
hope that she is gone and that she will not return. I suppose, though,
that she is to meet Lord Brompton somewhere."

And so it happened that at the moment that Geoffrey felt the first
pulsing strength of his love for her, and vowed that he would, despite
her riches and his entanglements, strive to gain her, Maggie was
strangling her old love for him, and her heart was filled with jealous
fears; and the woman whose wild passion had ruffled the current of their
true love was speeding to London to work their ruin.

Breakfast at Ripon House was a straggling, informal meal, and the men
came down in pink coats. They were going hunting on an anise-seed trail,
and ordered what they wished, standing by the side-board and eating.
Maggie, after the men had followed the hounds, left the other ladies
gossiping together in the library before the fire.

She walked down the cliff path which led to the shingle beach, upon
which the small craft of the fishermen in the little village were hauled
up.

Agains