es!--that's in a manner why. I came," she then said,
"because I knew of a sudden one day--knew as never before--that I was
old."

"I see. I see." He quite understood--she had notes that so struck him.
"And how did you like it?"

She hesitated--she decided. "Well, if I liked it, it was on the
principle perhaps on which some people like high game!"

"High game--that's good!" he laughed. "Ah, my dear, we're 'high'!"

She shook her head. "No, not you--yet. I at any rate didn't want any
more adventures," Cornelia said.

He showed their small relic again with assurance. "You wanted _us_. Then
here we are. Oh how we can talk!--with all those things you know! You
are an invention. And you'll see there are things J know. I shall turn
up here--well, daily."

She took it in, but only after a moment answered. "There was something
you said just now you'd tell me. Don't you mean to try----?"

"Mrs. Worthingham?" He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and
carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew's carte-de-visite, folding
it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he
spoke. "No--I've decided. I can't--I don't want to."

Cornelia marvelled--or looked as if she did. "Not for all she has?"

"Yes--I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn't. And, as I told
you, she herself doesn't--hasn't a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and
never will have."

Cornelia magnanimously thought "No--but she knows other things."

He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. "Too many--too
many. And other indeed--_so_ other! Do you know," he went on, "that it's
as if _you_--by turning up for me--had brought that home to me?"

"'For you,'" she candidly considered. "But what--since you can't marry
me!--can you do with me?"

Well, he seemed to have it all. "Everything. I can live with you--just
this way." To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her
fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. "I can't give you
up. It's very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you
renounced Bognor. That's it--I know it at last, and I see one can like
it. I'm 'high.' You needn't deny it. That's my taste. I'm old." And in
spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he
said it without the scowl.

THE BENCH OF DESOLATION

I

SHE had practically, he believed, conveyed the intimation, the
horrid, brutal, vulgar menace, in the course of their last
dre