upon the
lateness of the season and the clemency of the air. When they reached
the street, he turned with Cobbens in the direction of his house, with
an absent-minded though courteous good-night.

Though the leaves of the elms had now in a large measure left the
branches, the suggestion of a cathedral nave was still presented to the
mind. The equidistant trunks were, as formerly, the supporting
pillars, but the vista had suffered a mournful change, as if the roof
had suddenly been blown away, leaving the springing ribs a black
tracery against the autumnal sky. This ruinous work of the frost was
strangely offset by the soft witchery of the breeze, which seemed
either a reminiscence of the spring that was past, or a promise of the
spring to come. Leigh's thoughts took a turn in harmony with this
influence. He began to readjust his first conception of Miss
Wycliffe,--she was now Felicity in his unspoken meditations,--and to
realise that she was not like a Russian noblewoman, ready to sacrifice
all for socialism, as he had at first conceived her. Had she continued
to be such a magnificent and heroic creature, he would have loved her
less. She gained infinitely more than she lost by this more intimate
view. She was no longer a possible reformer and a subject for the
historian, but a woman pure and simple, with all a woman's alluring
inconsistencies.

Immersed in this new conception, he was startled by a voice and
hurrying step behind him, and turned to meet Cardington's outstretched
hand and the hospitable offer of a cigar. As they went on together,
his colleague commented in his voluminous way upon the evening they had
just spent, and before long, with Velasquez as a starting-point, he had
launched upon a compendious history of Spain, interspersed with
anecdotes of his own travels in that romantic land.

In this way they had almost reached the end of the rows of elms, when
they saw before them a man and woman walking with the slow and
tentative steps of those absorbed in deep personal conversation. At
their nearer approach the woman turned quickly for a moment, said
something in a low voice, and then the two hurried abruptly down a side
street, whose thicker shadows offered a screen from further
observation. Leigh, listening but inattentively to his companion's
disquisition and meditating still of Felicity, gave the couple only a
fleeting glance, thinking, if he thought of them at all, that they were
a maid f