in
part, there was also genuine humility in his love for Sophy--that
romantic abasement of self which makes a man find a subtle pleasure in
the realisation of his own unworthiness.

Loring had come down to Aleck Macfarlane's country place to buy hunters.
When he saw Sophy, he believed suddenly in Fate. No mere chance wish to
buy hunters had sent him to Virginia. Here was the Lady of Legend--the
Princess out of the fairy-tale books of his boyhood. He had always heard
of Virginia as romantic. Now he found that it was inhabited by Romance
herself in the person of Sophy Chesney. He had heard often of the Hon.
Mrs. Cecil Chesney. He knew that she "had written something." Poems were
not much "in his line." Yet he sent to Brentano's for Sophy's poems the
day after he met her. He was frankly disappointed in them. He had
expected something more fiery. And he tried to get a volume of her first
book, _The Shadow of a Flame_. But it was out of print. He had given
Brentano an order to find it for him. Only that morning the book had
arrived from England. He was still tingling with the fearless, young
passion of her printed words, as he walked now beside her. Her own words
seemed to put him from her--far back with that past self which she no
longer was, and which he craved to have her be again. And how young she
looked ... what a girl! It was absurd, vexatious, incredible, impossible
that so keen a flame should have died down into the white ash of
philosophy ... as expressed in her latest poems.

"A penny...." said Sophy.

His long silence disturbed her. He gazed down at her, his bold eyes
softening.

"I was thinking that you looked about nineteen, with that black bow on
your hair," he said.

"And you say that as if you were about ten," she retorted, laughing.

"I don't feel ten."

"And I don't feel nineteen."

"Yet you're really not quite old enough to be so devilish motherly with
me." His tone was quite pettish.

She was teasing him on purpose. She had found out at once that he was
badly spoilt. It pleased her to see him wince, and flush, helpless
under her amiable elderliness. She liked him very much, but she didn't
want any love-making, though she didn't mind his being so evidently in
love with her. She thought that a "disappointment in love" might do him
no end of good--teach him that he couldn't "swing the earth a trinket at
his wrist"--avenge some of the many young women with whom she felt sure
that he had flirted