ours which stood out
from the rest, hours in which she had felt restful,--almost content.
Mary lived those hours, trying to draw from them a conclusion. There
were hours spent in the Park, not in the afternoon, but the morning,
when it was comparatively empty. The rhododendrons were in full bloom
in the beds near Rotten Row; she heard people say that they had never
been finer than this year. There had been other hours in the Abbey,
both during the services and after; there had been an afternoon on an
excursion steamer plying up the river to Oxford; and a drive on the top
of an omnibus on a misty night, when the lights twinkled in softened
radiance, and the great buildings assumed a mysterious splendour. One
by one, Mary recalled the hours, but the conclusion could not be found.

Then suddenly her ears were opened to a woman's voice talking at the
table next to her own.

"Switzerland," she was saying. "Of course! As soon as I can run away.
I am longing for the time to come. I have been there every summer for
the last ten years, and if it rests with me, I shall go every year till
I die. I've tried Norway, I've tried the Tyrol, but I've gone back to
my old love, and I shall never wander again. Switzerland gives me what
I need. I go there and feed upon it. It's the tonic that braces me up
for another year of hard, ugly life."

There was a moment's silence, then another voice asked:

"But what exactly _do_ you feed on? What is the name of the tonic which
helps you so much?"

"Beauty!" said the woman deeply.

The blood rushed to Mary's cheeks. She had found her clue! That word
showed her the secret of her heart. All her life she had fed on prose;
now unconsciously she was craving the tonic of beauty. It had been
beauty in one form or another, which had brought her few hours of
content.

The next morning she packed her box, and took a ticket for Berne.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

BARRIERS.

The house at Gled Bay was situated at some distance from the cliff,
which was the spot most desired by its female tenants, but at the very
gates of the golf links, which presented the be-all of existence to the
two men. It was one of the aggressively new-looking edifices, which the
house-hunters of to-day regard with dismay, protesting with unnecessary
violence that nothing would induce them to make so prosaic a choice.
That is stage number one. Stage number two consists in an inspection of
cheerful rooms, wide wind