ere dark, dingy rooms, such as are to be found in countless numbers
among the narrow streets that encompass St. James's Street. They were
cheerless and comfortless, and, withal, high-rented, and possessed of
no other known advantage than that of their undeniably central situation.
They were not rooms that one would suppose any man would care to linger
in in broad daylight; and yet Sir John remained in them now a days
almost from morning till night.

He sat for the most part as he is sitting now--in a shabby, leathern
arm-chair, stooping a little forward, and doing nothing. Sometimes he
wrote a few necessary letters, sometimes he made a feint of reading the
paper; but oftenest he did nothing, only sat still, staring before him
with a hopeless misery in his face.

For in these days Sir John Kynaston was a very unhappy man. He had
received a blow such as strikes at the very root and spring of a man's
life--a blow which a younger man often battles through and is none the
worse in the end for, but under which a man of his age is apt to be
crushed and to succumb. Within a week of his wedding-day Vera Nevill
had broken her engagement to him. It had been a nine days' wonder in
Meadowshire--the county had rung with the news--everybody had marvelled
and speculated, but no one had got any nearer to the truth than that Vera
was supposed to have "mistaken her feelings." The women had cried shame
upon her for such capriciousness, and had voted her a fool into the
bargain for throwing over such a match; and if a male voice, somewhat
less timid than the rest, had here and there uplifted itself in her
defence and had ventured to hint that she might have had sufficient and
praiseworthy motives for her conduct, a chorus of feminine indignation
had smothered the kindly suggestion in a whole whirl-wind of abuse and
reviling.

As to Sir John, he blamed her not, and yet he knew no more about it than
any of them; he, too, could only have told you that Vera had mistaken her
feelings--he knew no more than that--for it was but half the truth that
she had told him. But it had been more than enough to convince him that
she was perfectly right. When, after telling him plainly that she found
she did not love him enough, that there had been other and extraneous
reasons that had blinded her to the fact at the time she had accepted
him, but that she had found it out later on; when, after saying this she
had asked him plainly whether he would wish to h