presently that they had all but reached St Paul's Crescent.

'Thank you for having come so far,' she said, pausing.

'Ah, you are nearly home. Why, it seems only a few minutes since we left
the girls. Now I'll run back to the whisky of which Maud disapproves.'

'May it do you good!' said Marian with a laugh.

A speech of this kind seemed unusual upon her lips. Jasper smiled as he
held her hand and regarded her.

'Then you can speak in a joking way?'

'Do I seem so very dull?'

'Dull, by no means. But sage and sober and reticent--and exactly what
I like in my friend, because it contrasts with my own habits. All the
better that merriment lies below it. Goodnight, Miss Yule.'

He strode off and in a minute or two turned his head to look at the
slight figure passing into darkness.

Marian's hand trembled as she tried to insert her latch-key. When
she had closed the door very quietly behind her she went to the
sitting-room; Mrs Yule was just laying aside the sewing on which she had
occupied herself throughout the lonely evening.

'I'm rather late,' said the girl, in a voice of subdued joyousness.

'Yes; I was getting a little uneasy, dear.'

'Oh, there's no danger.'

'You have been enjoying yourself, I can see.'

'I have had a pleasant evening.'

In the retrospect it seemed the pleasantest she had yet spent with her
friends, though she had set out in such a different mood. Her mind was
relieved of two anxieties; she felt sure that the girls had not
taken ill what she told them, and there was no longer the least doubt
concerning the authorship of that review in The Current.

She could confess to herself now that the assurance from Jasper's
lips was not superfluous. He might have weighed profit against other
considerations, and have written in that way of her father; she had not
felt that absolute confidence which defies every argument from human
frailty. And now she asked herself if faith of that unassailable kind is
ever possible; is it not only the poet's dream, the far ideal?

Marian often went thus far in her speculation. Her candour was allied
with clear insight into the possibilities of falsehood; she was not
readily the victim of illusion; thinking much, and speaking little, she
had not come to her twenty-third year without perceiving what a distance
lay between a girl's dream of life as it might be and life as it is. Had
she invariably disclosed her thoughts, she would have earned the repute
of a