gnificant smile remained with him. Good gracious! was she,
too, taking the sort of thing for granted? This power of suggestion from
every side was annoying: still--it would not be right to let that
prejudice him!

Wyndham paced to and fro feverishly. Why should he not----?

It was the first time he was impelled to put the question to himself in
clear seeking. Obscure in his mind these last weeks, it crystallised
itself brusquely--surprised him with its swift definiteness: but he
broke it off, all unprepared to meet it yet. He had a shamefaced
remembrance of his matrimonial conversation with Sadler, of the lofty
convictions he had then expressed.

Well, he had spoken honestly, he argued, and his convictions had changed
not a jot. "Only now that I am face to face with the actual possibility,
I see aspects of the case that then escaped me. Till now I have always
viewed marriage as the great central fact to which the whole of life has
to converge, from which everything else takes its significance. Hence it
was a case of the ideal or nothing--there seemed no other choice. But
now I recognise that matrimony that is not ideal may yet take its place
as an accessory to life, may be accepted as a good without filling the
whole horizon."

He resumed his feverish pacing. Well, why should he not seize an
opportunity which presented itself so favourably? By the loss of his
money he had become reduced in his own world to the rank of a mere
"detrimental." Had he not already felt that sufficiently? He laughed
harshly at the memory. No, no, a Lady Betty he could not hope to marry.
Such wondrous beings did not grow on every bush; nor did life permit of
his setting out in search of one. This holding out for the perfect ideal
only meant humiliation and sadness in the end. The world--the hard world
of fact--was like that, and you had to take it as you found it. No
folly could be greater than to forget that life was as it was, and not
as you thought it ought to be!

Yet he vacillated again. Did he really want to marry at all? Had he not
decided--wholly, absolutely, irrevocably--that his business in life was
work? Though he would never have spoken of it to another, he was proud
in his heart of his sentimental loyalty to Lady Betty, and marriage
seemed almost an unfaithfulness. Better perhaps to bend himself sternly
to the task before him!

Yes, but this task before him--unaided, he could never accomplish it.
Let him confess it now, sinc