so when she saw him on her birthday? She thought it
would be easier to speak on the one day when in girlish fashion she would
be queen. She would not think of her own pride, because his pride was dear
to her. She could not tell what she would say or do: she only knew that her
birthday should decide her fate. And her heart was beating fast in hope
and fear the night before when she banged the door after her and went off
to bed, sublimely ready to renounce the world for Percival.

CHAPTER III.

DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES--ALFRED THORNE'S IS TOLD BY THE WRITER.

Mr. Thorne of Brackenhill was a miserable man, who went through the world
with a morbidly sensitive spot in his nature. A touch on it was torture,
and unfortunately the circumstances of his daily life continually chafed
it.

It was only a common form of selfishness carried to excess. "I don't want
much," he would have said--truly enough, for Godfrey Thorne had never been
grasping--"but let it be my own." He could not enjoy anything unless he
knew that he might waste it if he liked. The highest good, fettered by any
condition, was in his eyes no good at all. Brackenhill was dear to him
because he could leave it to whom he would. He was seventy-six, and had
spent his life in improving his estate, but he prized nothing about it so
much as his right to give the result of his life's work to the first beggar
he might chance to meet. It would have made him still happier if he could
have had the power of destroying Brackenhill utterly, of wiping it off the
face of the earth, in case he could not find an heir who pleased him, for
it troubled him to think that some man _must_ have the land after him,
whether he wished it or not.

Godfrey Hammond had declared that no one could conceive the exquisite
torments Mr. Thorne would endure if he owned an estate with a magnificent
ruin on it, some unique and priceless relic of bygone days. "He should be
able to see it from his window," said Hammond, "and it should be his, as
far as law could make it, while he should be continually conscious that in
the eyes of all cultivated men he was merely its guardian. People should
write to the newspapers asserting boldly that the public had a right of
free access to it, and old gentlemen with antiquarian tastes should find a
little gap in a fence, and pen indignant appeals to the editor demanding to
be immediately informed whether a monument of national, nay, of world-wide
interest, oug