es together, David Helmsley would sit and watch
for their return in a curious sort of timorous suspense--wondering,
hoping, and fearing,--eager for the moment when Angus should speak his
mind to the woman he loved, and yet always afraid lest that woman
should, out of some super-sensitive feeling, put aside and reject that
love, even though she might long to accept it. However, day after day
passed and nothing happened. Either Angus hesitated, or else Mary was
unapproachable--and Helmsley worried himself in vain. They, who did not
know his secret, could not of course imagine the strained condition of
mind in which their undeclared feelings kept him,--and and he found
himself more perplexed and anxious over their apparent uncertainty than
he had ever been over some of his greatest financial schemes. Facts and
figures can to a certain extent be relied upon, but the fluctuating
humours and vagaries of a man and woman in love with each other are
beyond the most precise calculations of the skilled mathematician. For
it often happens that when they seem to be coldest they are warmest--and
cases have been known where they have taken the greatest pains to avoid
each other at a time when they have most deeply longed to be always
together. It was during this uncomfortable period of uneasiness and
hesitation for Helmsley, that Angus and Mary were perhaps most supremely
happy. Dimly, sweetly conscious that the gate of Heaven was open for
them and that it was Love, the greatest angel of all God's mighty host,
that waited for them there, they hovered round and round upon the
threshold of the glory, eager, yet afraid to enter. Up in the
primrose-carpeted woods together they talked, like good friends, of a
thousand things,--of the weather, of the promise of fruit in the
orchards, of the possibilities of a good fishing year, and of the
general beauty of the scenery around Weircombe. Then, of course, there
was the book which Angus was writing--a book now nearing completion. It
was a very useful book, because it gave them a constant and safe topic
of conversation. Many chapters were read and re-read--many passages
written and re-written for Mary's hearing and criticism,--and it may at
once be said that what had at first been merely clever, brilliant, and
intellectual writing, was now becoming not so much a book as an artistic
creation, through which the blood and colour of human life pulsed and
flowed, giving it force and vitality. Sometimes