ather--and, besides, it
will scarcely help Robin."

"Oh! no melodrama," she said, laughing and moving towards the door.
"Only, we understand each other, Garrie. Things won't do as they
are--or, as they promise to be."

Garrett returned, with a sigh of relief, to his papers.

For Harry the week had been a series of bitter disappointments. He
woke gradually from his dreams and saw that everything was changed. He
was in a new world and he was out of place. Those dreams had been
coloured, fantastically, beautifully. In the white pebbles, the golden
sand, the curling grey smoke of the Cove, he had formed pictures that
had lightened many dreary and lonely hours in Auckland. He was to come
back; away from that huge unwieldy life in which comfort had no place
and rest was impossible, back to all the old things, the wonderful
glorious things that meant home and tradition and, above all, love. He
was a sentimentalist, he knew that now. It had not been so in those
old days; the life had been too adventurous and exciting, and he had
despised the quiet comforts of a stay-at-home existence. But now he
knew its value; he would come home and take his place as head of the
family, as father, as citizen--he had learnt his lesson, and at last it
was time for the reward.

But now that he had come home he found that the lesson was not learnt,
or, perhaps, that the learning had been wasted; he must begin all over
again. Garrett and Clare had not changed; they had made no advances
and had shown him quite plainly, in the courteous Trojan fashion, that
they considered his presence an intrusion, that they had no place in
their ranks that he could fill. He was, he saw it plainly, no more in
line with them than he had been twenty years before. Indeed, matters
were worse. There was no possibility of agreement--they were poles
apart.

With the town, too, he was an "outsider." The men at the Club thought
him a bore--a person of strange enthusiasms and alarming heresies. By
the ladies he was considered rough: as Mrs. le Terry had put it to Miss
Ponsonby, he was a kind of too terrible bushranger without the romance!
He was gauche, he knew, and he hated the tea-parties. They talked
about things of which he knew nothing; he was too sincere to cover his
convictions with the fatuous chatter that passed, in Fallacy Street
society, for brilliant wit. That it was fatuous he was convinced, but
his conviction made matters no easier for him