ce was a remarkably
fetching young girl. To a man out of court and consequently out of
sorts the companionship of a pocket Venus is tonifying in the extreme.
It is not merely that, it is recuperative. It banishes the blues. It
establishes a new court, and with it a new code of its own.

The censorious allege that this is all wrong. It may be that they are
right. But Nature is not censorious. Nature is not even ethical. She
has no standards of right, no canons of wrong. What she does have is
her way. A saint may defy her. Annandale was not that by a long shot.
He was simply a human being, one that had been punished, and, as he
thought, unjustly punished, for that which might have been condoned.
Injustice humiliates. Saints may welcome humiliation, but human beings
resent it.

Over the emptiness which Sylvia had created there brooded therefore
two things. One was darkness, the other pique. In the light which
Fanny upheld it seemed to Annandale that they might be dispersed. This
idea, which he regarded as his very own, and consequently as highly
original, was not his in the least. It was Nature prompting him to
fill the vacuum which she so dislikes.

Instigated by her, Annandale invited Fanny up a stair and into a
tower, a place remote, aloof, furnished with seats for just two.

Fanny had not been there before. She had heard, though, of its
aloofness; it was regarded as a dangerous spot. But Fanny was a brave
girl. Besides, Annandale was at his worst, and even at his best was
not very alarming.

The ascent effected, Fanny peeped from a casement. "Why," she
exclaimed, "you can see everywhere!" She looked about. "But no one can
see you."

Assured of that, she produced a little gold box. On the back were her
initials in jewels. She opened it, took a cigarette and lit it. "Will
you have one?" she asked.

"This is a deuced nice case," said Annandale.

Fanny puffed and smiled.

"A present, I suppose."

"Yes. But you must not ask from whom."

Annandale looked out at the landscape, then in at the girl. "There is
something else I want to ask."

So grave was his tone that Fanny deployed for action.

"Will you marry me?"

Though Fanny had deployed, the shot bowled her over. Into one of the
chairs she dropped. Already Annandale had captured the other.

"Will you?"

But Fanny was recovering. With an air of vexation in which there was
amusement, she puffed at her cigarette and then at him.

"Now, honestly, have I