down before the fire,
without turning up the light. Anyone looking in, would have thought he
was asleep; but the drowsy influence of that deep chair and cosy fire
had drawn him back into the long-ago. What unhappy chance had made him
pass HER house to-day!

Some say there is no such thing as an affinity, no case--of a man, at
least--made bankrupt of passion by a single love. In theory, it may
be so; in fact, there are such men--neck-or-nothing men, quiet and
self-contained, the last to expect that nature will play them such a
trick, the last to desire such surrender of themselves, the last to
know when their fate is on them. Who could have seemed to himself, and,
indeed, to others, less likely than Charles Clare Winton to fall over
head and ears in love when he stepped into the Belvoir Hunt ballroom at
Grantham that December evening, twenty-four years ago? A keen soldier,
a dandy, a first-rate man to hounds, already almost a proverb in his
regiment for coolness and for a sort of courteous disregard of women as
among the minor things of life--he had stood there by the door, in no
hurry to dance, taking a survey with an air that just did not give an
impression of "side" because it was not at all put on. And--behold!--SHE
had walked past him, and his world was changed for ever. Was it an
illusion of light that made her whole spirit seem to shine through a
half-startled glance? Or a little trick of gait, a swaying, seductive
balance of body; was it the way her hair waved back, or a subtle scent,
as of a flower? What was it? The wife of a squire of those parts, with
a house in London. Her name? It doesn't matter--she has been long
enough dead. There was no excuse--not an ill-treated woman; an ordinary,
humdrum marriage, of three years standing; no children. An amiable good
fellow of a husband, fifteen years older than herself, inclined already
to be an invalid. No excuse! Yet, in one month from that night, Winton
and she were lovers, not only in thought but in deed. A thing so utterly
beyond "good form" and his sense of what was honourable and becoming in
an officer and gentleman that it was simply never a question of weighing
pro and con, the cons had it so completely. And yet from that first
evening, he was hers, she his. For each of them the one thought was how
to be with the other. If so--why did they not at least go off together?
Not for want of his beseeching. And no doubt, if she had survived Gyp's
birth, they woul