beautiful, sensitive
mouth, which he took care not to conceal with a moustache. Thus in
almost any company he would have looked striking and distinguished--the
sort of man of whom people ask, "Who is that standing over there?"

Varick was a man of moods--subject, that is, to fits of exultation and
of depression--and yet with an amazing power of self-control, and of
entirely hiding what he felt from those about him.

To-night his mood was one of exultation. He almost felt what Scots call
"fey." Something seemed to tell him that he was within reach of the
fruition of desires which, even in his most confident moments, had
appeared till now wildly out of any possibility of attainment. He came,
on both his father's and his mother's side, of people who had lived for
centuries the secure, pleasant life of the English county gentry. But
instead of taking advantage of their opportunities, the Varicks had gone
not upwards, but steadily downwards--the final crash having been owing
to the folly, indeed the far more than folly, as Lionel Varick had come
to know when still a child, of his own father.

Lionel's father had not lived long after his disgraceful bankruptcy. But
he had had time to imbue his boy with an intense pride in the past
glories of the Varick family. So it was that the shabby, ugly little
villa where his boyhood had been spent on the outskirts of a town famous
for its grammar-school, and where his mother settled for her boy's sake
after her husband's death, had been peopled to young Varick with visions
of just such a country home as was this wonderful old house now before
him.

No wonder he felt "fey" to-night. Everything was falling out as he had
hoped it would do. He had staked very high--staked, indeed, all that a
man can stake in our complex civilization, and he had won! In the whole
wide world there was only one human being who wished him ill. This was
an elderly woman, named Julia Pigchalke, who had been his late wife's
one-time governess and companion. She had been his enemy from the first
day they had met, and she had done her utmost to prevent his marriage to
her employer. Even now, in spite of what poor Milly's own solicitor
called his "thoughtful generosity" to Miss Pigchalke, the woman was
pursuing Varick with an almost insane hatred. About six months ago she
had called on Dr. Panton, the clever young medical man who had attended
poor Mrs. Varick during her last illness. She had formulated vague
accu