uous mortals, and the kettle was cool and detached, but ready to
act when called on. The steady purpose of the clock, from which nothing
but its own key could turn it, was to strike nine next, and the cloth
was laid for supper. Supper was ready for incarnation, somewhere, and
smelt of something that would have appealed to Dave, but had no charm
for Gwen.

For she was sick at heart, and the moment that a pause left her free to
admit it, heavy-eyed from an outcrop of head-oppression on the lids. It
might have come away in tears, but her tissues grudged an outlet. She
saw no balm in Gilead, but she could sit on a little in the silence, for
rest. She could hear the voices of the two old sisters through the
doors, and knew that Mrs. Picture was again awake, and talking. That was
well!--leave them to each other, for all the time that might still be
theirs, this side the grave.

What a whirl of strange unprecedented excitements had been hers since
... since when? Thought stopped to ask the question. Could she name the
beginning of it all? Yes, plainly enough. It all began, for her, at the
end of that long rainy day in July, when the sunset flamed upon the
Towers, and she saw a trespasser in the Park, with a dog. She could feel
again the unscrupulous paws of Achilles on her bosom, could hear his
master's indignant voice calling him off, and then could see those
beautiful dark eyes fixed on what their owner could not dream was his
for ever, but which those eyes might never see again. She could watch
the retiring figure, striding away through the bracken, and wonder that
she should have stood there without a thought of the future. Why could
she not have seized him and held him in her arms, and baffled all the
cruelty of Fate? For was he not, even then, hers--hers--hers beyond a
doubt? Could she not see now that her heart had said "I love you" even
as he looked up from that peccant dog-collar, the source of all the
mischief?

That was what began it. It was that which led her to stay with her
cousin in Cavendish Square, and to a certain impatience with
conventional "social duties," making her welcome as a change in
excitements an excursion or two into unexplored regions, of which Sapps
Court was to be the introductory sample. It was that which had brought
into her life this sweet old woman with the glorious hair. No wonder she
loved her! She never thought of her engrossing affection as strange or
to be wondered at. That it shoul