hort--and alas! all too perilous--glimpse that had been revealed to
her of the inner life and soul of the man whose lightest touch she had
learnt that day to fear as she feared no other living thing.

CHAPTER XV.

VERA'S MESSAGE.

Alas! how easily things go wrong,
A word too much, or a sigh too long;
And there comes a mist and a driving rain,
And life is never the same again.

The library at Kynaston was the room which Sir John had used as his only
sitting-room since he had come down to stay in his own house. When his
wedding with Miss Nevill had been definitely fixed, there had come down
from town a whole army of decorators and painters and upholsterers, who
had set to work to renovate and adorn the rest of the house for the
advent of the bride, who was so soon to be brought home to it.

They had altered things in various ways, they had improved a few, and
they had spoiled a good many more; they had, at all events, introduced a
wholesome and thorough system of cleansing and cleaning throughout the
house, that had been very welcome to the soul of Mrs. Eccles; but into
the library they had not penetrated. The old bookshelves remained
untouched; the old books, in their musty brown calf bindings, were
undesecrated by profaning hands. All sorts of quaint chairs and bureaus,
gathered together out of every other room in the house, had congregated
here. The space over the mantelpiece was adorned by a splendid portrait
by Vandyke, flanked irreverently on either side by a series of old
sporting prints, representing the whole beginning, continuation, and
end of a steeple-chase course, and which, it is melancholy to state, were
far more highly appreciated by Sir John than the beautiful and valuable
picture which they surrounded. Below these, and on the mantelpiece
itself, were gathered together a heterogeneous collection of pipes,
spurs, horse-shoes, bits, and other implements, which the superintending
hands of any lady would have straightway relegated to the stables.

In this library Sir John and his brother fed, smoked, wrote and read,
and lived, in fact, entirely in full and disorderly enjoyment of their
bachelorhood and its privileges. The room, consequently, was in a
condition of untidiness and confusion, which was the despair of Mrs.
Eccles and the delight of the two men themselves, who had even forbidden
the entrance of any housemaid into it upon pain of instant dismissal.
Mrs. Eccles submitted hersel