nce answered. He saw, and bowed his head, and Mount Dunstan
knew he wished him to continue.

"Sometimes--of late--it has been too much for me and I have given free
rein to my fancy--knowing that there could never be more than fancy.
I was doing it this afternoon as I watched her move about among the
people. And Mary Lithcom began to talk about her." He smiled a grim
smile. "Perhaps it was an intervention of the gods to drag me down from
my impious heights. She was quite unconscious that she was driving
home facts like nails--the facts that every man who wanted money wanted
Reuben S. Vanderpoel's daughter--and that the young lady, not being
dull, was not unaware of the obvious truth! And that men with prizes
to offer were ready to offer them in a proper manner. Also that she was
only a brilliant bird of passage, who, in a few months, would be caught
in the dazzling net of the great world. And that even Lord Westholt
and Dunholm Castle were not quite what she might expect. Lady Mary was
sincerely interested. She drove it home in her ardour. She told me to
LOOK at her--to LOOK at her mouth and chin and eyelashes--and to make
note of what she stood for in a crowd of ordinary people. I could have
laughed aloud with rage and self-mockery."

Mr. Penzance was resting his forehead on his hand, his elbow on his
chair's arm.

"This is profound unhappiness," he said. "It is profound unhappiness."

Mount Dunstan answered by a brusque gesture.

"But it will pass away," went on Penzance, "and not as you fear it
must," in answer to another gesture, fiercely impatient. "Not that way.
Some day--or night--you will stand here together, and you will tell her
all you have told me. I KNOW it will be so."

"What!" Mount Dunstan cried out. But the words had been spoken with such
absolute conviction that he felt himself become pale.

It was with the same conviction that Penzance went on.

"I have spent my quiet life in thinking of the forces for which we find
no explanation--of the causes of which we only see the effects. Long ago
in looking at you in one of my pondering moments I said to myself that
YOU were of the Primeval Force which cannot lose its way--which sweeps
a clear pathway for itself as it moves--and which cannot be held back.
I said to you just now that because you are a strong man you cannot be
sure that a woman you are--even in spite of yourself--making mad love
to, is unconscious that you are doing it. You do not know wh