she had
never yet heard from him, "Well, Gwen, yours is the loveliest room I've
ever seen."

It was indeed triumphantly lovely, although, examining it more
critically by the morning light, he had found slight dissatisfactions.
It was perhaps a little too much like an admirably sophisticated
curiosity-shop. It was an object to be examined with delight, hardly a
subject to be lived with with love. And it almost distressed him to see
the touch of genial commonplaceness expressing itself pervasively in the
big bowls and jars and vases of pink roses that burgeoned everywhere.
They showed no real sense of what the lacquer and glass and porcelain
demanded; for they demanded surely a more fragile, less obvious flower.
And one or two minor ornaments, though evidently selected with
scrupulous conscientiousness, seemed to him equally at fault. Still, he
had again that morning, before seating himself to write, repeated in all
sincerity, "This is really the loveliest room," and Gwendolen, from
where she knelt above Aunt Pickthorne's box, had answered, following his
eyes, "I am _so_ glad you like it, dear Owen."

Gwendolen was very fond of him, and her fondness had never been so
marked. It was of that he had been thinking as he wrote. He had never
felt fonder of Gwendolen. Her drawing-room was lovely, her widow's weeds
became her, and she was, as she had always been, the kindest of
creatures. In every sense the house would be a pleasanter one to stay at
than in old Mr. Conyers's lifetime. Owen had not liked old Mr. Conyers,
who had had too much the air of thinking himself an historical figure
and his breakfast historical events, who snubbed his wife and quoted
Greek and Latin pugnaciously, and took the cabinet ministers and
duchesses who sometimes sojourned under his roof, with an unctuousness
that made more marked the aridity of his manner toward less illustrious
guests. The Conyers had come to count in the eyes of Chislebridge and
the surrounding country as the social figure-heads of the studious old
town, and Owen had found himself, as Gwendolen's crippled, writing,
cousin, year by year of relatively less importance in the eyes of
Gwendolen's husband. Actually, as it happened, he had during those years
become almost illustrious himself; but his austere distinction, such as
it was, had been as moonrise rather than dawn, and had left him as
gently impersonal as before, and even more impoverished.
Negligible-looking as he knew he