kful I should be that at least I do not love her!"

Then he clenched his hands, and his aching thoughts escaped the iron
control under which since his engagement he had tried always to keep
them, and they went back to Halcyone. He saw again with agonizing
clearness her little tender face, when her soft, true eyes had melted
into his as she whispered of love.

"This is what God means in everything." Well, God had very little to do
with himself and Cecilia Cricklander!

And then he suddenly seemed to see the brutishness of men. Here was
he--a refined, honorable gentleman--in a few weeks going to play false
to his every instinct, and take this woman whom he was growing to
despise--and perhaps dislike--into his arms and into his life, in that
most intimate relationship which, he realized now, should only be
undertaken when passionate calls of tenderest love imperatively forced
it. She would have the right to be with him day--and night. She might be
the mother of his children--and he would have to watch her instincts,
which he surely would have daily grown to loathe, coming out in them.
And all because money had failed him in his own resources and was
necessary to his ambitions, and this necessity, working with an appeal
to his senses when fired with wine, had brought about the situation.

God Almighty! How low he felt!

And he groaned aloud.

Then from a small dispatch box, which he had got his servant to put by
his bed, he drew forth a little gold case, in which for all these years
he had kept an oak leaf. He had had it made in the enthusiasm of his
youth when he had returned to London after Halcyone, the wise-eyed
child, had given it to him, and it had gone about everywhere with him
since as a sort of fetish.

It burnt his sight when he looked at it now. For had he been "good and
true"? Alas! No--nothing but a sensual, ambitious weakling.

CHAPTER XXVII

The Professor and his protegee spent the whole of that July wandering in
Brittany--going from one old-world spot to another. There had not been
much opposition raised by Mr. and Mrs. Anderton to Halcyone's
accompanying her old master. They themselves were going to Scotland, and
there Mabel had decided she would no longer be kept in the schoolroom,
and intended to come forward as a grown-up girl assisting in the
hospitalities of her father's shooting lodge. And Mrs. Anderton, knowing
her temper, thought a rival of any sort might make difficulties. So, as