he most serious indiscretion; but in
this case the temptation to which he had yielded appeared to him, by the
light of day, to be entirely out of proportion to any actual enjoyment
he had experienced. An impulse which was neither vanity nor daring, but
a mixture of the two, had swept away his resolve before he was clearly
aware, as he expressed it, "of the drift of the wind." He had not wanted
to go with her and yet he had gone, impelled by some fury of adventure
which had seemed all the time to pull against his saner inclinations.

While he ate his two eggs and his four pieces of toast, as he had done
every morning for the last fifteen years, he remembered, with a mild
pang of remorse, that he had not seen Laura since his return. Without
doubt she had expected him last evening, had put on, probably, her most
becoming gown to receive him; and the thought of her disappointment
entered his heart with a very positive reproach. This reproach, short
lived as it was, had the effect of enkindling his imaginary picture of
her; and the eagerness with which he now looked forward to his visit
completely crowded from his mind the recollection that, but for his own
fault, he might have seen her with as little effort on the evening
before.

As he sat there over his breakfast, with an unfolded newspaper on the
table beside him, he realised, in a proper spirit of thankfulness, that
he had never felt himself to be in a more thoroughly domestic mood. His
face, in which the clear red from his country trip was still visible,
settled immediately into its most genial lines, while he expanded his
chest with a deep breath which strained the topmost button on the new
English waistcoat which he wore. The sober prospect of marriage no
longer annoyed him when he thought of it, and he could even look forward
complacently to seeing the same woman opposite to him at breakfast for
twenty years.

"By Jove, I've come to the place when to settle down and live quietly is
the best thing I can do," he concluded, as he helped himself to
marmalade. "I've reached the time of life when a man has to pull up and
go easily or else break to pieces. It's all very well to take one's
fling in youth, but middle age is the period for retrenchment."

Then, while he still congratulated himself upon the expediency of
virtue, another image appeared in his reflections, and the paternal
instinct, so strong in men of his kind, responded instantly to the
argument which clot