you must.'"

He ended with a short laugh. Ruth did not laugh. Her mind was
masculine at many points, but like a true woman she detested ironical
speech.

"That is Mr. Langton's way of talking," she said; "and you are using it
to hide your feelings. Will you tell me her name?--her Christian name
only?"

"She was called Margaret--Margaret Dance. There is no reason why you
should not have it in full."

"Is there a portrait of her?"

"Yes; as a girl she sat to Kneller--a Dryad leaning against an oak.
The picture hangs in my dressing-room."

"It should have hung, rather, in Dicky's nursery; which," she added,
picking up and using the weapon she most disliked, "need not have
debarred your seeing it from time to time."

He glanced up, for he had never before heard her speak thus sharply.

"Perhaps you are right," he agreed; "though, for me, I let the dead bury
the dead. I have no belief, remember, in any life beyond this one.
Margaret is gone, and I see not how, being dead, she can advantage me or
Dicky."

His words angered Ruth and at the same time subtly pleased her; and on
second thoughts angered her the more for having pleased. She thought
scorn of herself for her momentary jealousy of the dead; scorn for
having felt relief at his careless tone; and some scorn to be soothed by
a doctrine that, in her heart, she knew to be false.

For the moment her passions were like clouds in thunder weather,
mounting against the wind; and in the small tumult of them she let
jealousy dart its last lightning tongue.

"I am not learned in these matters, my lord. But I have heard that man
must make a deity of something. The worse sort of unbeliever, they say,
lives in the present and burns incense to himself. The better sort,
having no future to believe in, idolises his past."

"Margaret is dead," he repeated. "I am no sentimentalist."

She bent her head. To herself she whispered. "He may not idolise his
past, yet he cannot escape from it." . . . And her thoughts might have
travelled farther, but she had put the mare to a walk again and just
then her ears caught an unaccustomed sound, or confusion of sounds.

At the end of the alley she reined up, wide-eyed.

A narrow gateway here gave access to what had yesterday been a sloping
paddock where Miss Quiney grazed a couple of cows. To-day the cows had
vanished and given way to a small army of labourers. Broad strips of
turf had vanished also and the brown loam w