lready I 've begun to call it hard names, such as deadly, and cold,
and snobbish. I'm beginning to see that a man like myself must always
be on the outside here. I ought to have begun to live in Warwick three
generations ago, or to have brought a fortune with me. In the West men
are estimated on their individual merits, and one is n't made to feel
himself an outsider."

"Perhaps because there's no inside to get into," she suggested coolly.

He had a vision of that sanctum into which Cobbens could buy his way
with his wife's money, and he realised that this was not the first
glimpse he had had of a quality in the woman he loved that was not all
sweetness.

"I feel like one who has interfered in a family quarrel," he returned,
good-naturedly. "Well, I may be only a transient here, a bird of
passage nesting for a year in the towers of the Hall. I will earnestly
request myself to be amused at the spectacle of a democratic
aristocracy." He felt that in her heart she agreed with him, else, why
did she favour Emmet's candidacy?

"That will be like the attempt to extract sunbeams from cucumbers," she
replied, with a note of weariness in her voice. "But the equanimity
with which you took my speech about the West makes me feel like a
horrid shrew. Have you really got a sweet disposition, Mr. Leigh, or
are you just putting on airs?"

"Perhaps I have some occult reason for wishing to win your good
opinion," he suggested.

For the second time she staved off a personal drift in the
conversation. "It's getting darker," she said, looking about with
sudden concern.

"Don't say you must be going, Miss Wycliffe," he begged. "This is the
very best part of the day. Let me light a fire of pine cones." He
started up and stood before her, anticipating her acquiescence. She
nodded her approval graciously, and at that moment the setting sun,
struggling through the trees, shone full across her face and illumined
her eyes. In this clear glow they were no longer black, but brown as
the brown velvet of her jacket. He was haunted by a sense of a
duplicated experience, and then remembered the fragile girl sitting on
the stone step with her basket of eggs in her lap. But Miss Wycliffe's
colouring was glorified, rather than penetrated, by the sun's rays,
enriched rather than absorbed. Her face, framed in a large hat faced
underneath with a delicate tint of blue chiffon, seemed to look out at
him as from an inverted sea-shell, a