y without saying it. I was always sure of her;
she understood me as nobody else ever can." He paused. "All that's
gone."

"Oh, no," Mrs. Norman said, "it isn't."

"It is." He illuminated himself with a faint flame of passion.

"Don't say that, when you have friends who understand."

"They don't. They can't. And," said Wilkinson, "I don't want them
to."

Mrs. Norman sat silent, as in the presence of something sacred and
supreme.

She confessed afterward that what had attracted her to Peter
Wilkinson was his tremendous capacity for devotion. Only (this she
did not confess) she never dreamed that it had been given to his
wife.

MISS TARRANT'S TEMPERAMENT

I

She had arrived.

Fanny Brocklebank, as she passed the library, had thought it worth
while to look in upon Straker with the news.

Straker could not help suspecting his hostess of an iniquitous
desire to see how he would take it. Or perhaps she may have meant,
in her exquisite benevolence, to prepare him. Balanced on the arm of
the opposite chair, the humor of her candid eyes chastened by what
he took to be a remorseful pity, she had the air of preparing him
for something.

Yes. She had arrived. She was upstairs, over his very head--resting.

Straker screwed up his eyes. Only by a prodigious effort could he
see Miss Tarrant resting. He had always thought of her as an
unwinking, untiring splendor, an imperishable fascination; he had
shrunk from inquiring by what mortal process she renewed her
formidable flame.

By a gesture of shoulders and of eyebrows Fanny conveyed that,
whatever he thought of Philippa Tarrant, she was more so than ever.
She--she was simply stupendous. It was Fanny's word. He would see.
She would appear at teatime. If he was on the terrace by five he
would see something worth seeing. It was now a quarter to.

He gathered that Fanny had only looked in to tell him that he
mustn't miss it.

Not for worlds would he have missed it. But the clock had struck
five, and Straker was still lingering in the library over the
correspondence that will pursue a rising barrister in his flight to
the country. He wasn't in a hurry. He knew that Miss Tarrant would
wait for her moment, and he waited too.

A smile of acclamation greeted his dilatory entrance on the terrace.
He was assured that, though late, he was still in time. He knew it.
She would not appear until the last guest had settled peaceably into
his place, until the scene was