hem worth while. If then he lived, he proposed at some
indefinite time, in the late thirties, to fall in love and marry. He had
no parents living; there was the empty house upon the Sussex Downs; and
the small estate which for generations had descended from father to son.
Marriage was thus a recognized event. Only it was thrust away into an
indefinite future. But there had come an evening which he had not
foreseen, when, sorely grieved by the loss of his great friend, he had
fallen in with a girl who gave with open hands the sympathy he needed,
and claimed, by her very reticence and humility, his sympathy in return.
A day had followed upon that evening; and thenceforth the image of Sylvia
standing upon the snow-ridge of the Aiguille d'Argentiere, with a few
strips of white cloud sailing in a blue sky overhead, the massive pile of
Mont Blanc in front, freed to the sunlight which was her due, remained
fixed and riveted in his thoughts. He began in imagination to refer
matters of moment to her judgment; he began to save up little events of
interest that he might remember to tell them to her. He understood that
he had a companion, even when he was alone, a condition which he had not
anticipated even for his late thirties. And he came to the conclusion
that he had not that complete ordering of his life on which he had
counted. He was not, however, disappointed. He seized upon the good thing
which had come to him with a great deal of wonder and a very thankful
heart; and he was not disposed to let it lightly go.

Thus the vulgarity which Garratt Skinner chose to assume, the
unattractive figure of "red-hot" Barstow, and the obvious swindle which
was being perpetrated on Walter Hine, had the opposite effect to that
which Skinner expected. Chayne, instead of turning his back upon so
distasteful a company, frequented it in the resolve to take Sylvia out of
its grasp. It did not need a lover to see that she slept little of nights
and passed distressful days. She had fled from her mother's friends at
Chamonix, only to find herself helpless amongst a worse gang in her
father's house. Very well. She must be released. He had proposed to take
her away then and there. She had refused. Well, he had been blunt. He
would go about the business in the future in a more delicate way. And so
he came again and again to the little house under the hill where the
stream babbled through the garden, and every day the apples grew redder
upon the boughs