e of happiness.

"Bless your big heart," he answered warmly. "I understand right
enough. By all means help 'em if you can. I'll not baulk you. But
it's a delicate task; and I don't quite see how you are going to set
about it."

"Nor do I,--yet. One can only trust to intuition, and the inspiration
of the moment. From the little he said, it seems that the first move
ought to come from her: and possibly my intimacy with him may help to
bring her to her senses. Everything depends, of course, on how much
she cares. That's still an unknown quantity. But she dislikes me
already; which is a promising sign!--Now I am going to fill your pipe,
and pour you out a peg; and we'll enjoy ourselves till it's time for
second supper!"

It is just such quiet hours of heart-to-heart intimacy that constitute
true marriage. For in these uneventful moments links are forged and
soldered strong enough to resist the buffeting of storms, or the
deadlier, corrosive influence of those minor miseries which poison the
very core of life.

A handful of stars--visible through the open glass door into the
verandah--had began to pale, when Desmond lifted his wife to her feet,
and blew out the lamp. In the profound stillness their footsteps and
low laughter sounded up the wooden stairs. Then a door shut somewhere
in the house, and the night absorbed them into herself.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Ce n'est pas le mort qui separe le plus les individus."
--De Coulevain.

And what of Lenox, after Honor Desmond's sympathetic exertions on his
behalf?

He went straight from her side to the cloak-room; and thence slowly
back to his unhomelike rooms at the hotel; a dark solitary figure, with
bent head, and a heart full of tumultuous hopes and fears. The events
of the evening had stirred him as he had not been stirred since those
early days of torment, of undignified oscillation between yearning and
despair: and now, at last, love unsteadied for the first time the
foundations of his pride; brought home to him the cardinal truth that
all the beauty and terror of life spring from the inexorable law of
duality that links man and woman, act and consequence, with the same
passionless unconcern.

All the way up the hill, this man--who loved night and her
manifestations as most men love the morning--had no thought to spare
for the splendour of the heavens or the shrouded majesty of earth, so
absorbed was he in framing and rejecting possible l