d,
mocking in them. He had acknowledged the greeting with the curtest of
nods.

Now he got up, shook hands awkwardly with Mrs. Ilbert, and made his
farewells to Mary Gray. It was sheer ill-temper drove him out as soon as
they had come. He had wanted to ask Mary if he might bring Nelly when
she returned to town. He had wanted ... a good many other things. But
now he stalked away from her presence with fury in his heart. If the
Ilberts were going to take her up!--to exploit the book! The Ilberts
belonged to the young Tory party which his soul detested, or he said so
in his wrath; as a matter of fact, he had not many detestations, and in
the matter of politics he had no personal rancours. Yet at the moment he
thought he had, and fancied that a part of his indignation was because
Mary Gray, who had learnt in the Radical school, was going to be made
much of by advanced Tories. As he sat in his hansom, "stepping westward"
into the heart of the sunset, he bit the ends of his moustache, and it
was like chewing the cud of bitterness. Mary Gray had expanded to answer
the genial warmth of Mrs. Ilbert's manner as a flower opens to the sun.
It was not in her to be ungracious, and Mrs. Ilbert was a charming
woman.

And now he asked himself what was he going to do for the next month or
six weeks till his mother and Nelly came home? All the winter he had
been in the habit of seeing Mary Gray two or three times a week. He had
been home a week from Lugano, and he had kept away; and all the time
something stronger than himself had seemed to be tugging at him to take
the old familiar road. He had found it a hard struggle to keep away for
those ten days. And how was he going to do it for all those weeks to
come? He had always had so much to say to her--or, at least, there had
always been things he wanted to say, for in his most intimate moments he
was naturally rather silent.

For a second his thoughts escaped his control, and settled on the
pleasantness that bare ugly work-a-day room had meant to him all the
winter through. The sodden winter streets, swept by bitter winds,
horrible in fog and snow, through which he had hurried on his way had
had something heavenly about them. "Ah, le beau temps passe!"

He pulled himself together with a sharp shock of reproach. He was to
marry Nelly in less than three months' time, and he was an honourable
man. When Nelly was his wife he meant that every thought of his heart
should belong to her. He m