the vague
ideas and more or less poetical aspirations which for five long years
had gathered themselves about that memory, took shape and form, and in
his heart he knew he loved her. Then as the days went on and he came
to know her better, he grew to love her more and more, till at last
his whole heart went out towards his late found treasure, and she
became more than life to him, more than aught else had been or could
be. Serene and happy were those days which they spent in painting and
talking as they wandered about the Honham Castle grounds. By degrees
Ida's slight but perceptible hardness of manner wore away, and she
stood out what she was, one of the sweetest and most natural women in
England, and with it all, a woman having brains and force of
character.

Soon Harold discovered that her life had been anything but an easy
one. The constant anxiety about money and her father's affairs had
worn her down and hardened her till, as she said, she began to feel as
though she had no heart left. Then too he heard all her trouble about
her dead and only brother James, how dearly she had loved him, and
what a sore trouble he had been with his extravagant ways and his
continual demands for money, which had to be met somehow or other. At
last came the crushing blow of his death, and with it the certainty of
the extinction of the male line of the de la Molles, and she said that
for a while she had believed her father would never hold up his head
again. But his vitality was equal to the shock, and after a time the
debts began to come in, which although he was not legally bound to do
so, her father would insist upon meeting to the last farthing for the
honour of the family and out of respect for his son's memory. This
increased their money troubles, which had gone on and on, always
getting worse as the agricultural depression deepened, till things had
reached their present position.

All this she told him bit by bit, only keeping back from him the last
development of the drama with the part that Edward Cossey had played
in it, and sad enough it made him to think of that ancient house of de
la Molle vanishing into the night of ruin.

Also she told him something of her own life, how companionless it had
been since her brother went into the army, for she had no real friends
about Honham, and not even an acquaintance of her own tastes, which,
without being gushingly so, were decidedly artistic and intellectual.
"I should have wish