te bitterly for a season,
and then to get revenged on by making a much more brilliant marriage, as
she could easily have done. But it was infinitely worse, and more
humiliating to be thrown over like this by the man whom she had looked
upon as her future husband nearly all her life, whom she had played at
housekeeping with while they were children, and whom she had never
looked upon as anything else but a sweetheart or a lover--and yet it was
true, miserably true, and now, for the sake of a mere idea, she found
herself cast off, loverless and alone.

Then, after a few weeks of secret, but exceeding bitterness, she did
what nineteen out of every twenty girls would have done under the
circumstances. The twentieth girl would probably have considered her
life blighted for ever, and vowed the remainder of it to
single-blessedness, charity and good works as a Sister of something or
other. But Enid belonged to the practical majority, and so when the
breaking off of the engagement became an actual social fact, and
Reginald Garthorne came just at the psychological moment to tell her
that never since he had earned that boyish licking on the steamer by
kissing her, had he been able to look with love into the eyes of any
other woman, she had told him with perfect frankness that, as it was
quite impossible for her to marry Vane, and as she certainly liked him
next best, and had not the slightest intention of remaining single, she
was perfectly content to marry him. If he chose to take her on those
terms he might go and talk the matter over with Sir Godfrey, and if he
and her mother said "yes," she would say "yes," too.

It was a somewhat prosaic wooing, perhaps, but Reginald Garthorne had
been hungering for her in his heart for years. Outwardly he had been
friends with Vane, but in his soul he had hated him consistently as boy
and man ever since that scene behind the wheelhouse of the _Orient_. He
was, therefore, perfectly content. He had longed for her, and he didn't
care how he got her. The rest would come afterwards.

He was rich, far richer than Vane ever would be. He had inherited a
fortune of nearly two hundred thousand pounds from his mother's side of
the family when he came of age. On his father's death he would succeed
to the title and a fine old country house in the Midlands, with a
rent-roll and mining royalties worth over thirty thousand a year. He
would be able to make her life a continuous dream of pleasure, amidst