could! She is as cold as ice; as innocent as a
child: and yet I think there is a tremendous capacity for passion in
those dark eyes of hers, those mobile, sensitive lips! What lips to
kiss! what eyes to flash back fire and feeling! what a splendid woman to
win and show the world! It would be like loving a goddess--as if Diana
herself had stooped from Olympus to grace Endymion!"

And then he laughed aloud.

"What a fool I am! Poetizing like a boy; and all about a girl who never
can be my wife at all. That's the worst part of it. I am
engaged--engaged! unutterably ridiculous word!--to marry little Ethel
Kenyon, the pretty actress at the Novelty. The respectable, wealthy,
well-connected actress, moreover--the product of modern civilization:
the young woman of our day who aspires to purify the drama and vindicate
the claims of histrionic art--what rubbish it all is! If Ethel were a
ballet-dancer, or had taken to opera bouffe, she would be much more
entertaining! But her enthusiasms, and her belief in herself and her
mission, along with that _mignonne_, provoking, pretty, little face of
hers, are altogether too incongruous! No, Ethel bores me, it must be
confessed; and I have got to marry her--all for a paltry twenty thousand
pounds! What a fool I was to propose before I had seen Brooke's
daughter.

"If it weren't for Francis, I would break it off. But how else am I to
pay that two thousand? And what won't he do if I fail to pay it? No,
that would be ruin--unless I choke him off in some other way, and I
don't see how I can do that. No, I must marry Ethel, I suppose, or go to
the devil. And unless I could take bonny Lesley with me, that would not
mend matters."

He threw his cigar into the fire, and stood for some minutes looking
down at it, with gloom imprinted upon his brow.

"I must do something," he said at last. "It's getting too much for me: I
shall have to stop going to Brooke's house. I suppose this is what
people call falling in love! Well, I can honestly say I have never done
it in this fashion before! I have flirted, I have made love scores of
times, but I never wanted a woman for my own as I want _her_! And I
think I had better keep out of her way--for her eyes will send me mad!"

So he soliloquized: so he resolved; but inclination was stronger than
will or judgment. Day after day saw him at the Brookes' house; and day
after day saw the shadows deepen on Ethel's face, and the fold of
perplexity grow more d