amp of
death to be set upon her. At night, lying upon his breast, she would
sometimes cling to him in an agony of desperate love, adjuring him to
tell her the truth as to that Other: whether he did not see that she was
different from his own Milly, whether it were possible that he could
love that mysterious being as he loved her, his true, loving wife. Ian,
who had been wont to hold stern doctrines as to the paramount obligation
of truthfulness, perjured himself again and again, and hoped the
Recording Angel dropped the customary tear. But, however deep the
perjury, before long he was sure to find himself obliged to renew it.

To a man of his sensitive and punctilious nature the situation was
almost intolerable. The pity of this tender, innocent life, his care,
which seemed like some little inland bird, torn by the tempest from its
native fields and tossed out to be the plaything of an immense and
terrible ocean whose deeps no man has sounded! The pity of that other
life, so winged for shining flight, so armed for triumphant battle, yet
held down helpless in those cold ocean depths, and for pity's sake not
to be helped by so much as a thought! Yet from the thorns of his hidden
life he plucked one flower of comfort which to him, the philosopher, the
man of Abstract Thought, was as refreshing as a pious reflection would
be to a man of Religion. He had once been somewhat shaken by the dicta
of the modern philosophers who relegate human love to the plane of an
illness or an appetite. But where was the physical difference between
the woman he so passionately loved and the one for whom he had never
felt more than affection and pity? If from the strange adventure of his
marriage he had lost some certainties concerning the human soul, he had
gained the certainty that Love at least appertains to it.

One hot afternoon Milly was writing her Australian letter under a
spreading ilex-tree on the lawn. Lady Thomson and Ian were sitting there
also; he reading the latest French novel, she making notes for a speech
she had to deliver shortly at the opening of a Girls' High School.

It is sometimes difficult to find the right news for people who have
been for some years out of England, and Milly, in the languor of her
melancholy, had relaxed the excellent habit formed under Aunt Beatrice
of always keeping her mind to the subject in hand. She sat at the table
with one hand propping her chin, gazing dreamily at the bright
flower-beds on