them, the clarifying element
which saved their happiness from stagnation, and kept it in the strong
mid-current of human feeling.

It was this element in their affection which, in the last days of
November, was unexpectedly put on trial. Mr. Langhope, since his return
from his annual visit to Europe, showed signs of diminishing strength
and elasticity. He had had to give up his nightly dinner parties, to
desert his stall at the Opera: to take, in short, as he plaintively put
it, his social pleasures homoeopathically. Certain of his friends
explained the change by saying that he had never been "quite the same"
since his daughter's death; while others found its determining cause in
the shock of Amherst's second marriage. But this insinuation Mr.
Langhope in due time discredited by writing to ask the Amhersts if they
would not pity his loneliness and spend the winter in town with him. The
proposal came in a letter to Justine, which she handed to her husband
one afternoon on his return from the mills.

She sat behind the tea-table in the Westmore drawing-room, now at last
transformed, not into Mrs. Dressel's vision of "something lovely in
Louis Seize," but into a warm yet sober setting for books, for scattered
flowers, for deep chairs and shaded lamps in pleasant nearness to each
other.

Amherst raised his eyes from the letter, thinking as he did so how well
her bright head, with its flame-like play of meanings, fitted into the
background she had made for it. Still unobservant of external details,
he was beginning to feel a vague well-being of the eye wherever her
touch had passed.

"Well, we must do it," he said simply.

"Oh, must we?" she murmured, holding out his cup.

He smiled at her note of dejection. "Unnatural woman! New York _versus_
Hanaford--do you really dislike it so much?"

She tried to bring a tone of consent into her voice. "I shall be very
glad to be with Cicely again--and that, of course," she reflected, "is
the reason why Mr. Langhope wants us."

"Well--if it is, it's a good reason."

"Yes. But how much shall you be with us?"

"If you say so, I'll arrange to get away for a month or two."

"Oh, no: I don't want that!" she said, with a smile that triumphed a
little. "But why should not Cicely come here?"

"If Mr. Langhope is cut off from his usual amusements, I'm afraid that
would only make him more lonely."

"Yes, I suppose so." She put aside her untasted cup, resting her elbows
on her kn