ondemned, and even
despised, by the older man, and he had been made to feel that it was
only for the sake of his father--his high-minded, unsuspicious
father--that he was being saved from the public exposure of a
peculiarly sordid divorce suit.

But it was in all sincerity that the young man now felt indignant with
Major Lane for having distressed such a delicately spiritual soul as
was Thomas Carden with the hidden details of the Garvice story. After
all, what interested the public was not the question of Garvice's
moral character, but whether a gently nurtured and attractive woman
had carried through a sinister and ingenious crime, which, but for a
mere accident, would have utterly defied detection.

Theodore Carden got up from the breakfast table and walked over to a
circular bay-window which commanded charming views of the wide,
sloping garden, interspersed with the streams and tiny ponds which
gave the house its name of Watermead, and which enabled old Mr. Carden
to indulge himself with especial ease in his hobby of water
gardening.

Standing there, the young man began wondering what he should do with
himself this early spring day. His fiancee had just left the quiet
lodgings which she and her mother, a clergyman's widow, had occupied
in Birmingham during the last few weeks, to pay visits to relatives in
the South. The thought of going to any of the neighbouring houses,
where he knew himself to be sure of a warm welcome, and where the news
of his engagement would be received with boisterous congratulations,
tempered in some cases with an underlying touch of regret and
astonishment, filled him with repugnance. The girl he had chosen to be
his wife was absolutely different from the women who had hitherto
attracted him; he reverenced as well as loved her, and hitherto
Theodore Carden had never found reverence to be in any sense a
corollary of passion.

The last few days had brought a great change in his life, and one
which he meant should be permanent; and yet, in spite or perhaps
because of this, as he stood staring with absent eyes into his
father's charming garden, he found his mind dwelling persistently on
the only one of his many amorous adventures which had left a deep, an
enduring, and, it must be admitted, a most delightful mark on the
tablets of his memory.

The whole thing was still so vivid to him that half-involuntarily he
turned round and looked down the long room to where his old father was
sitti