ueen
would not permit his name to be mentioned in her presence. That gentle
spirit, the Countess of Blessington, indifferent to the world that
shut its door in her own face, alone received him in what was still
the most brilliant _salon_ in England. But even Anne knew that during
a recent visit to London, when a few faithful and distinguished men,
including Count d'Orsay, Disraeli, Barry Cornwall, Monckton Milnes,
and Crabb Robinson, had given him a banquet at the Travellers' Club,
he had become so disgracefully drunk that when he left England two
days later, announcing his intention never to return, not one of those
long suffering gentlemen had appeared at the dock to bid him farewell.

But Anne heard few of these horrid stories in detail, and her
imagination made no effort to supply the lack. Her attitude was
curiously indifferent. She had never seen his picture. He dwelt with
her in the realm of fancy, a creation of her own; and in spite of the
teeming incidents of that mental life, her common sense had assured
her long since that they would never meet, that with the real Byam
Warner she had naught to do. Her father had been forty-five when he
was taken off by a mis-made gas in his laboratory; she had expected to
be still his silent companion when herself was long past that age--an
age for caps and knitting needles, and memories laid away in jars of
old rose leaves.

It is possible that had Mrs. Nunn not succeeded in letting Warkworth
Manor she would never have uprooted her niece, who, face to face with
the prospect of Nevis, realised that she wished for nothing so little
as to meet Byam Warner, realised that the end of dreams would be the
finish of the best in life. But circumstances were too strong for
Anne, and she found herself in London fitting on excessively smart and
uncomfortable gowns, submitting to have her side locks cut short and
curled according to the latest mode, and even to wear a fillet, which
scraped her hitherto untrammelled brow.

She had little time to think about Byam Warner, but when the memory of
him shortened her breath she hastily assured herself that she was
unlikely to meet an outcast even on an island, that she should not
know him if she did, and that Bath House, whose doors were closed
upon him, was a world in itself. And she should see Nevis, which had
been as much her home as Warkworth Manor, see those other glowing bits
of a vanished paradise. There are certain people born for the