under
the late Mrs. Saxham's will. Seven thousand in Consols and Home Rails, and
the little freehold property in North Wales, that brought in, when the
house was let, about one hundred and fifty pounds a year, counted as
wealth to a man who had possessed nothing. He lifted his square head and
threw back his heavy shoulders with the air of one from whom a heavy
burden has been taken. His vivid eyes lightened, his heavy brows smoothed
out their puckers, and the tense lines about his lips relaxed. His own
words came back to him:

"The Past is done with. Why should not the Future be fair?"

He knew, as he looked towards Lynette Mildare, who personified the Future
for him, and his mood changed. He had loved her without hope. Now a faint
grey began to show in the blackness of his mental horizon. It might be a
false dawn, but what a lightening of the heavy heart--what a leap of the
stagnant blood--answered to it! He was no longer penniless. He had never
loved money or thirsted for estate, but the thought of that sum of seven
thousand pounds solidly invested, and the house that stood in its walled
garden on the cliffs at Herion, looking out on the wild, tumbling
grey-white waters of Nantavon Bay, was dear to him.

Plas Bendigaid had been a Convent once. Its grey, stone-tiled,
steep-pitched roof and solid walls of massive stone had sheltered his
mother's infancy and girlhood. Perhaps they might cover a lovelier head,
and echo to the voices of his wife and his children. He gave sweet fancies
the rein, as Lady Hannah chattered beside him. He dreamed of that Future
that might be fair, even as he filled up the little lady's pauses with
"Yes's" and "No's."

Love at first sight. He had laughed the possibility to scorn, in other
days, holding the passion to be the sober child of propinquity, sympathy,
consonance of ideas, similar tastes, and pursuits, and fanned into flame,
after due time to kindle, by the appearance of a rival.

A rival! He laughed silently, grimly, remembering the resentful, jealous
impulse that had prompted his interruption when the boyish, handsome face
of Beauvayse had leaned so near to hers, and the blush that dyed her
white-rose cheeks had answered, no doubt, to some hackneyed, stereotyped,
garrison compliment.

He had seen them together since then: once crossing the veld from the
Women's Laager on foot, in the company of the Mother-Superior; once here
beside the river, under the chaperonage of all