oint of view. It is never easy for a man to put himself into a woman's
place, or to enter into the extra sensitiveness of soul with which she is
endowed.

So it was that he agreed to go straight back to Kynaston, and to make the
old house his permanent home according to his wife's wishes.

It was whilst the newly-married couple were passing through Switzerland
on their homeward journey that they suddenly came across Mr. Herbert
Pryme, who had been performing a melancholy and solitary pilgrimage in
the land of tourists.

It was at the table d'hote at Vevay, upon coming down to that lengthy
and untempting repast, chiefly composed of aged goats and stringy hens,
which the inventive Swiss waiter exalts, with the effort of a soaring
imagination, into "Chamois," and "Salmi de Poulet," that Captain and Mrs.
Kynaston, who had scarcely recovered from a passage of arms in the
seclusion of their bed-chamber, suddenly descried a familiar face amongst
the long array of uncongenial people ranged down either side of the
table.

What the print of a hob-nailed boot must be to the lonely traveller
across the desert, what the sight of a man from one's own club going down
Pall Mall is in mid-September, or as a draught of Giesler's '68 to an
epicure who has been about to perish on ginger-beer--so did Herbert
Pryme's face shine upon Maurice Kynaston out of the arid waste of that
Vevay _salle-a-manger_.

In England he had been only an acquaintance--at Vevay he became his most
intimate friend. The delight of having a man to speak to, and a man who
knew others of his friends, was almost intoxicating. To think of getting
one evening--nay, one hour of liberty from that ever-present chain of
matrimonial intercourse which was galling him so sorely, was a bliss for
which he could hardly find words to express his gratitude.

Herbert, who could not quite understand the reason of it, was almost
overpowered by the warmth of Captain Kynaston's greeting. To have his
place removed next to his own, and to grasp him heartily by both hands,
wringing them with affectionate fervour, was the work of a few seconds.
And then, who so lively, so full of anecdote and laughter, so interested
in all that could be said to him, as Maurice Kynaston during that dinner?

It made Helen angry to hear him. He could be agreeable enough, she
thought, bitterly, to a chance acquaintance, picked up nobody knew where;
he could find plenty of conversation for this almost unkno