old ideas as she was taught
them. It is all beautiful to her, what may seem doubtful or grotesque to
others. And why should I or anyone else trouble her? I above all, who am
not fit to tie her shoe-strings.'

The young husband's face seemed to gleam in the dim light which fell
upon it. Langham involuntarily put up his hand in silence and touched
his sleeve. Robert gave him a quiet friendly look, and the two men
instantly plunged into some quite trivial and commonplace subject.

Langham entered his room that night with a renewed sense of pleasure in
the country quiet, the peaceful flower-scented house. Catherine, who
was an admirable housewife, had put out her best guest-sheets for his
benefit, and the tutor, accustomed for long years to the second-best of
college service, looked at their shining surfaces and frilled edges, at
the freshly matted floor, at the flowers on the dressing-table, at
the spotlessness of everything in the room, with a distinct sense that
matrimony had its advantages. He had come down to visit the Elsmeres,
sustained by a considerable sense of virtue. He still loved Elsmere and
cared to see him. It was a much colder love, no doubt, than that which
he had given to the undergraduate. But the man altogether was a colder
creature, who for years had been drawing in tentacle after tentacle,
and becoming more and more content to live without his kind. Robert's
parsonage, however, and Robert's wife had no attractions for him; and it
was with an effort that he had made up his mind to accept the invitation
which Catherine had made an effort to write.

And, after all, the experience promised to be pleasant. His fastidious
love for the quieter, subtler sorts of beauty was touched by the
Elsmere surroundings. And whatever Miss Leyburn might be, she was not
commonplace. The demon of convention had no large part in _her!_ Langham
lay awake for a time analyzing his impressions of her with some gusto,
and meditating, with a whimsical candor which seldom failed him, on the
manner in which she had trampled on him, and the reasons why.

He woke up, however, in a totally different frame of mind. He was
preeminently a person of moods, dependent, probably, as all moods are,
on certain obscure physical variations. And his mental temperature had
run down in the night. The house, the people who had been fresh and
interesting to him twelve hours before, were now the burden he had
more than half-expected them to be. He la