o years was
enough. She must take up her part in life, grasp its realities, help
others if she could. She could not love this poor outcast, but were
she offered a share in his redemption she should embrace the
circumstance as a sacred duty.

In time, perhaps, she might even marry. That dreadful old woman was
right, no doubt, it was her manifest destiny. Certainly she should
like to have children and a fine establishment of her own. Lord
Hunsdon was unacceptable, but doubtless a prepossessing suitor would
arrive before long, and when he did she would marry him gladly and
live rationally and dream no more. And when she reached this decision
she wept, and could not go down to luncheon; but she did not retire
from the mental step she had taken.

CHAPTER VI

Her mind had time to recover its balance.

It was a fortnight and more before she met Byam Warner. Lady Hunsdon,
to her secret wrath and amazement, met defeat with the poet himself.
He replied politely to her ladyship's flattering notes, but only to
remind her that he was very busy, that he had been a recluse for some
years, that he was too much out of health to be fit for the society
of ladies. The estimable Hunsdon, after one fruitless interview,
invariably found the poet from home when he called. "The massa" was
up in the hills. He was on St. Kitts. He was visiting relatives on
Antigua. Had he been in London he could not more successfully have
protected himself. Lord Hunsdon was a man of stubborn purpose, but he
could not search the closed rooms along the gallery.

But the poet's indifference to social patronage at least accomplished
one of the objects upon which Lady Hunsdon had set her heart. The
guests of Bath House, vaguely curious, or properly scandalised, at the
first, soon became quite feverish to meet the distinguished friend of
Lord Hunsdon. So rapidly does a fashion, a fad, leap from bulb to
blossom in idle minds, that before a fortnight was out even the young
men were anxious to extend the hand of good fellowship, while as for
the young ladies, they dreamed of placing his reformation to their own
private account, learned his less subtle poems by heart, and began to
write him anonymous notes.

Meanwhile, Anne, hoping that his purpose would prove of a consistency
with his habits, and determined to dismiss him from her thoughts,
found sufficient pleasure and distraction in her daily life. She made
her short skirts--several hemmed strips gathere