the other things
and came over here to seek my fortune."

As he said this he looked straight at Carol, their eyes met for a
moment, and then she coloured up swiftly and looked away.

The four wound up the evening with a sumptuous supper at Prince's, at
which Rayburn played host to perfection, and within a week Carol and he
had left Charing Cross by the eleven o'clock boat-train on a trip which
had no particular objective, but which, as a matter of fact, extended
round the world before Carol again saw her beloved London. In addition
to her other rings she wore a new thick wedding ring, a compromise with
conventionality which the etiquette of hotels and steamer saloons had
rendered imperative, and thus it came to pass that Miss Carol,
travelling as Mrs. Charles Redfern, vanished utterly for more than a
year, and this, too, was why all the efforts of Vane and Ernshaw and Sir
Arthur to find her had proved for the present unavailing.

CHAPTER XII.

Enid Garthorne came back from a somewhat extended honeymoon trip to the
Riviera and thence on through Northern Italy to Venice, whence she
returned via Vienna and Paris, a very different woman from the Enid
Raleigh who had cried so bitterly over that farewell letter of Vane's in
her bedroom at Oxford.

She had already schooled herself to look upon her long love for Vane as,
after all, only the sustained infatuation of a romantic school-girl, and
upon him as a high-hearted, clean-souled but utterly impossible
visionary who had sacrificed the substance for the shadow, and who,
having chosen irrevocably, could only be left to work out his own
destiny as he had shaped it.

Garthorne, in the first flush of his gratified love and triumph, had
proved an almost ideal combination of lover and husband, and of all the
brides who were honeymooning in the most luxurious resorts of the
Continent that Autumn and Winter, she, with her youth and beauty, her
handsome, devoted husband, and splendid fortunes, was accounted the most
to be envied. As week after week went by, and the intoxication of her
new life grew upon her, she gradually came to believe this herself. At
the same time, something very like true affection for this man, whose
love was very real and who seemed to find his only happiness in making
the world the most delightful of dreamlands for her, began to grow up in
her heart.

Of course, she often thought of Vane; that was inevitable. It was
inevitable, too, that she