s decline, unsustained by
any sense of its comedy. He had avoided her in the most marked manner;
but all the same, she wondered whether he was thinking about her, and
if so, what he was thinking.

What he thought that night, and the next, and the next after that, was
something like this: "My dear lady, you think yourself remarkably
clever. But really there is nothing striking about you except the colour
of your hair. Biggest bore in the county--prettiest girl in the room? If
it weren't for your prettiness--well, as yet that may have saved you
from being a bore." After that he laughed whenever he caught himself
trying to piece together the image which his memory persistently
presented to him in fragments: now an oval face tinged with a childlike
bloom, now grey eyes ringed with black, under dark eyebrows and lashes;
or a little Roman nose with a sensitive tip, or a mouth that to the best
of his recollection curled up at the corners, making a perpetual dimple
in each cheek. They were frivolous details, but for weeks he carried
them about with him along with his more valuable property.

CHAPTER II

Scandal was mistaken. Miss Audrey Craven was not in search of a
religion, but she had passed all her life looking for a revelation. She
had no idea of the precise form it was to take, but had never wavered in
her belief that it was there, waiting for her, as it were, round a dark
corner. Hitherto the ideal had shown a provoking reticence; the
perfectly unique sensation had failed to turn up at the critical moment.
Audrey had reached the ripe age of ten before the death of her father
and mother, and this event could not be expected to provide her with a
wholly new emotion. She had been familiarised with sorrow through fine
gradations of funereal tragedy, having witnessed the passing of her
canary, her dormouse, and her rabbit. The end of these engaging
creatures had been peculiarly distressing, hastened as it was by
starvation, under most insanitary conditions.

The age of ten is the age of disenchantment--for those of us who can
take a hint. For Audrey disenchantment never wholly came. She went on
making the same extravagant demands, without a suspicion of the limited
resources of life. It was the way of the Cravens. Up to the last her
father never lost his blind confidence in a world which had provided him
with a great deal of irregular amusement. But the late Mr. Craven could
be wise for others, though not for hims