to which the overarching trees lent
an added gloom and mystery, as though some incarnate terror pursued
them. The gate clanged-to behind the carriage. The groom scrambled
breathlessly into his place. Sir Richard's driving was rather reckless,
he ventured to think, on such a nasty, dark night, and with a lady
along of him too. He was not sorry when the pace slowed down to a walk.
That was a long sight safer, to his thinking.

"The right point of view is this," Richard said at last; "that in
accepting you would be doing that which, in some ways, would make just
all the difference to my life."

He held himself very upright on the sloping driving-seat, rather
cruelly conscious of the broad strap about his waist, and the high,
unsightly driving-iron against which, concealed by the heavy, fur rug,
his feet pushed as he steadied himself. He paused, gazing away into the
silent desolation of the now invisible woods, and when he spoke again
his voice had deepened in tone.

"It must be patent to you--it is rather detestably patent to every one,
I suppose, if it comes to that--that I am condemned to be of precious
little use to myself or any one else. I share the fate of the immortal
Sancho Panza in his island of Barataria. A very fine feast is spread
before me, while I find myself authoritatively forbidden to eat first
of this dish and then of that, until I end by being every bit as hungry
as though the table was bare. It becomes rather a nuisance at times,
you know, and taxes one's temper and one's philosophy. It seems a
little rough to possess all that so many men of my age would give just
anything to have, and yet be unable to get anything but unsatisfied
hunger, and--in plain English--humiliation, out of it."

Madame de Vallorbes sat very still. Her charming face had grown keen.
She listened, drawing in her breath with a little sobbing sound--but
that was only the result of accentuated dramatic satisfaction.

"You see I have no special object or ambition. I can't have one. I just
pass the time. I don't see any prospect of my ever being able to do
more than that. There's my mother, of course. I need not tell you she
and I love one another. And there are the horses. But I don't care to
bet, and I never attend a race-meeting. I--I do not choose to make an
exhibition of myself."

Again Helen drew her hand out of her muff, but this time quickly,
impulsively, and laid it on Richard's left hand which held the reins.
The young