mbered all that he had heard said
about American women. Did those pretty clothes of hers mean that she
would be extravagant and selfish to obtain them? Could a young man
with no great fortune offer her the luxury that was necessary to her?
and even so, what changes come with time! He had a full realization of
what the boredom of family life can be, when passion has grown stale.

"At seventy, say, when I am palsied and she is old and fat, will
romance be alive then? Will such feeling leave anything real behind it
when it falls away, as the white blossoms on Mrs. Prettyman's plum
tree will shrink and fall a fortnight hence?"

He looked about him. On the walls of the little church were tablets
with the de Tracy names; the names of her forefathers amongst them.
Under his feet were other flags with names upon them too; and out
there in the sunshine were the grave-stones of a hundred dead. How
many of them had been happy in their loves?

Not so many, he thought, if all were told, and why should he hope to
be different? Yet surely this was a new feeling, a worthy one, at
last. It was not for her charming person that he loved her; not
because of her beauty and her gaiety only; but because he had seen in
her something that gave a promise of completion to his own nature, the
something that would satisfy not only his senses but his empty heart.

He clenched his hands on the carved top of the old pew in front of
him, which was fashioned into a laughing gnome with the body of a
duck. "And if this should be all a dream," he asked himself again, "if
this should all be false too! Good Lord!" he cried half aloud, "I
want to be honest now! I want to find the truth. My whole life is on
the throw this time!"

There was a moment's silence after he had uttered the words. He got up
and moved slowly down the aisle, opening the door, seeing again the
meadow of buttercups, yellow as gold, and listening again to the
sparrows chirruping in the sunshine outside.

"I have been in that church a quarter of an hour," he said to himself,
"and in trying to dive to the depths of myself and find out whether I
was giving a woman all I had to give, I did not get time to consider
that woman's probable answer, should I place my uninteresting life and
liberty at her disposal."

XV

"NOW LUBIN IS AWAY"

Lavendar made his adieux after luncheon and went off to London.
"Good-bye for the present, Mrs. de Tracy; I shall be back on Wednesday
probab