say anything, but I thought--if you won't mind my saying so,
Mr. Kendal--that, considering all things, it would have been better if
you had been there.'

'It seems to me,' said Kendal, with vexation in his voice, 'that there is
a fate against my doing anything as I ought to do it. I thought, on the
whole, it would be better not to make a fuss about it when it came to
the last. You see she must look upon me to some extent as a critical, if
not a hostile, influence, and I did not wish to remind her of my
existence.'

'Oh well,' said Mrs. Stuart in her cheery commonsense way, 'that evening
was such an overwhelming experience that I don't suppose she could have
felt any soreness towards anybody. And, do you know, she _is_ improved?
I don't quite know what it is, but certainly one or two of those long
scenes she does more intelligently, and even the death-scene is
better,--less monotonous. I sometimes think she will surprise us all
yet.'

'Very likely,' said Kendal absently, not in reality believing a word of
it, but it was impossible to dissent.

'I hope so,' exclaimed Mrs. Stuart, 'with all my heart. She has been very
depressed often these last weeks, and certainly, on the whole, people
have been harder upon her than they were at first. I am so glad that she
and your sister will meet in Venice. Madame de Chateauvieux is just the
friend she wants.'

Kendal walked home feeling the rankling of a fresh pin-point. She had
asked for him, and he had not been there! What must she think,
apparently, but that, from a sour, morose consistency, he had refused to
be a witness of her triumph!

Oh, hostile fates!

* * * * *

A week later Eustace was settled in the Surrey farmhouse which had
sheltered the Sunday League on its first expedition. The Surrey country
was in its full glory: the first purple heather was fully out, and the
distant hills rose blue and vaporous across stretches of vivid crimson,
broken here and there by the dim gray greens of the furze or the sharper
colour of the bracken. The chorus of birds had died away, but the nests
were not yet tenantless. The great sand-pit near the farmhouse was still
vocal with innumerable broods of sand-martins, still enlivened by the
constant skimming to and fro of the parent birds. And under Kendal's
sitting-room window a pair of tomtits, which the party had watched that
May Sunday, were just launching their young family on the world. One of
his