ve glimmered
some little warning. But Mr. Shanner's footing in the house was as
old-established as the rest of his appertainings; and Miss Robinson's
spirit was ever at the nadir of diffidence. Men as a rule shunned her:
women cared as little to talk to her. That anybody might ever wish to
marry her had seemed impossible, inconceivable. Mr. Shanner had many
pretensions to style, yet, to her spoiled eye, he seemed merely of clay
indifferent.

She strung herself to the ordeal of refusing him, though her real
strength knew no faltering. For he proved insistent; wooed
her--soberly--decorously--as became the dignity of five decades
completed; wooed her with reasons of urgency, and implications of
sentiment. He was to depart on a mission to the New World; wished to
bear her promise with him. He would treasure it; would think of the new
light to shine in his household. But within her lay an unfailing
inspiration, and her innermost soul stood like a tower impregnable;
though she was all wounds and distress, and quivered with the hurt. Was
not her heart with her Prince Charming? her one dream in life the
privilege of helping him?

Mr. Shanner had to sail away disconsolate!

But, though Miss Robinson's mind was occupied day and night with this
problem of Wyndham's salvation, she could arrive at no plausible
solution. For how should she ever dare to give him a sign? She who would
have yielded her life for him could only watch him drifting downwards
with an agonised sense of her helplessness.

And he all the while unsuspecting of this obscure, loving historian of
his existence; of the warm heart that beat for him in these evil days on
which he had fallen!

II

For hours the rain had beaten against his windows, and at last, now that
a lull had declared itself, Wyndham dragged himself to the door, and
looked out into the gray afternoon. His eye took in the familiar vista,
but, as it rested on the great bow-windowed house at the corner where
the road branched into two, he turned away with a shudder. For years the
sight of that house had irritated him: its ugly brick bulk had been
symbolic of all Suburbia, of everything in life to which he was
instinctively hostile as an artist and a gentleman.

But presently he laughed: it had struck him as comic that he should have
preserved in its freshness his full youthful contempt for all this
Philistine universe!--he, a half-starved devil of an artist, down in the
mouth, with a