of a rather friendless life had passed into the
championship of beauty.

In a short time it was over. Nothing had happened either in Sawston or
within himself. He had shocked half-a-dozen people, squabbled with his
sister, and bickered with his mother. He concluded that nothing could
happen, not knowing that human love and love of truth sometimes conquer
where love of beauty fails.

A little disenchanted, a little tired, but aesthetically intact, he
resumed his placid life, relying more and more on his second gift, the
gift of humour. If he could not reform the world, he could at all
events laugh at it, thus attaining at least an intellectual superiority.
Laughter, he read and believed, was a sign of good moral health, and he
laughed on contentedly, till Lilia's marriage toppled contentment down
for ever. Italy, the land of beauty, was ruined for him. She had no
power to change men and things who dwelt in her. She, too, could produce
avarice, brutality, stupidity--and, what was worse, vulgarity. It was on
her soil and through her influence that a silly woman had married a cad.
He hated Gino, the betrayer of his life's ideal, and now that the sordid
tragedy had come, it filled him with pangs, not of sympathy, but of
final disillusion.

The disillusion was convenient for Mrs. Herriton, who saw a trying
little period ahead of her, and was glad to have her family united.

"Are we to go into mourning, do you think?" She always asked her
children's advice where possible.

Harriet thought that they should. She had been detestable to Lilia
while she lived, but she always felt that the dead deserve attention
and sympathy. "After all she has suffered. That letter kept me awake for
nights. The whole thing is like one of those horrible modern plays where
no one is in 'the right.' But if we have mourning, it will mean telling
Irma."

"Of course we must tell Irma!" said Philip.

"Of course," said his mother. "But I think we can still not tell her
about Lilia's marriage."

"I don't think that. And she must have suspected something by now."

"So one would have supposed. But she never cared for her mother, and
little girls of nine don't reason clearly. She looks on it as a long
visit. And it is important, most important, that she should not receive
a shock. All a child's life depends on the ideal it has of its parents.
Destroy that and everything goes--morals, behaviour, everything.
Absolute trust in some one else is the esse