stonishment, one may almost say to his disconcerting, he found the prey
all at once, and, as it were, without a struggle, fluttering to his
lure, and practically within his grasp. There was an evening when
Daphne's sudden softness, the look in her eyes, the inflection in her
voice had fairly thrown him off his balance. For the first time he had
shown a lack of self-command and self-possession. Whereupon, in a flash,
a new and strange Daphne had developed--imperious, difficult,
incalculable. The more he gave, the more she claimed. Nor was it mere
girlish caprice. The young Englishman, invited to a game that he had
never yet played, felt in it something sinister and bewildering.
Gropingly, he divined in front of him a future of tyranny on her side,
of expected submission on his. The Northern character in him, with its
reserve, its phlegm, its general sanity, began to shrink from the
Southern elements in her. He became aware of the depths in her nature,
of things volcanic and primitive, and the English stuff in him recoiled.

So he was to be bitted and bridled, it seemed, in the future. Daphne
Floyd would have bought him with her dollars, and he would have to pay
the price.

Something natural and wild in him said No! If he married this girl he
would be master, in spite of her money. He realized vaguely, at any
rate, the strength of her will, and the way in which it had been
tempered and steeled by circumstance. But the perception only roused in
himself some slumbering tenacities and vehemences of which he had been
scarcely aware. So that, almost immediately--since there was no glamour
of passion on his side--he began to resent her small tyrannies, to draw
in, and draw back. A few quarrels--not ordinary lovers' quarrels, but
representing a true grapple of personalities--sprang up behind a screen
of trifles. Daphne was once more rude and provoking, Roger cool and
apparently indifferent. This was the stage when Mrs. Verrier had become
an admiring observer of what she supposed to be his "tactics." But she
knew nothing of the curious little crisis which had preceded them.

Then the Maddisons, mother and daughter, "my tutor's friends," had
appeared upon the scene--charming people! Of course civilities were due
to them, and had to be paid them. Next to his mother--and to the girl of
the orchard--the affections of this youth, who was morally backward and
immature, but neither callous nor fundamentally selfish, had been
chiefly g