the sun, and yet enters into another chap's love affairs as if
he understood it all. I believe it will make him happy to win my cause
with Madeleine. I wish one could do something for _his_ happiness. It
is absurd, you know," as though apostrophising an objector, "a man
can't be happy without a woman. And yet again, my good Jack, you never
thought that before you met Madeleine. He has not met his Madeleine,
that's what it means. Where ignorance is bliss.... Friend Adrian! Let
us console ourselves and call you ignorantly happy, in your old crow's
nest. You have not stocked it so badly either.--For all your ignorance
in love, you have a pretty taste in liquor."

So thinking, he poured himself a last glass of his host's wine, which
he held for a moment in smiling cogitation, looking, with the mind's
eye, through the thick walls of the keep, across the cold mist-covered
sands of Scarthey and again through the warm and scented air of a
certain room (imagination pictured) where Madeleine must at that hour
lie in her slumber. After a moment of silent adoration he sent a
rapturous kiss landwards and tossed his glass with a last toast:

"Madeleine, my sweet! To your softly closed lids."

And again Captain Jack fell to telling over the precious tale of that
morning's interview, furtively secured, by that lover's luck he so
dutifully blessed, under the cluster of Scotch firs near the grey and
crumbling boundary walls of Pulwick Park.

CHAPTER XVIII

"LOVE GILDS THE SCENE AND WOMAN GUIDES THE PLOT"

Tanty's wrath upon discovering Sir Adrian's departure was all the
greater because she could extort no real explanation from Rupert, and
because her attacks rebounded, as it were, from the polished surface
he exposed to them on every side. Madeleine's indifference, and
Molly's apparently reckless spirits, further discomposed her during
supper; and upon the latter young lady's disappearance after the meal,
it was as much as she could do to finish her nightly game of patience
before mounting to seek her with the purpose of relieving her
overcharged feelings, and procuring what enlightenment she might.

The unwonted spectacle of the saucy damsel in tears made Miss
O'Donoghue halt upon the threshold, the hot wind of anger upon which
she seemed to be propelled into the room falling into sudden
nothingness.

There could be no mistake about it. Molly was weeping; so
energetically indeed, with such a passion of tears and sobs,