fitted well. She would not
come to him, but the ideal of her rested beautiful in the delicate pride
and fastidiousness of her scruples and her purity. The sort of life he
must lead, no less than that he had led, must needs have soiled the
image and stained its spotless white. He was conscious that his
reception of what she said was half the outcome of the moment in which
her decision reached him; but yet he could not look before him, and the
idea of himself, restored to his former mind, scornfully mocking what
now claimed reverence, angrily fighting against a merely fanciful
hindrance, failed to dress itself like reality, though experience,
half-smothered, protested that it would prove real. Now he was very
sorry for her and for himself; but it was the sorrow of acquiescence,
the pain of a vision that never could have had fulfilment not the fierce
disappointment of well-grounded hope. Though she were passing out of
his life, yet she would always be in it and of it, and their unhappiness
seemed to him a tie as close as could have been knit between them by any
union.

He was interrupted by the entrance of his daughter and Norburn. They
were troubled, as a glance at their happy faces told him, by no sense of
the end of things; they were at the beginning, and he was amused to find
that, while they deplored his defeat sincerely and resented it hotly, it
yet had a bright side to them. It set Jack Norburn at liberty; he had
now no official ties and there would be a lull in politics. How should
two young people use such an interval better than in getting married?

"How indeed?" said Mr. Medland, smiling.

"Then when we're comfortably married," said Daisy, "and you've had a
little rest, we'll have at Sir Robert again, father! Oh, and I'm so glad
those tiresome Eynesfords are going--except Alicia, I mean; I like her.
I do hope the next people won't be quite so--" And Daisy's gesture
indicated the inhuman exclusiveness and pride supposed to be harboured
at Government House.

"Well, we go our way and they go theirs," said Norburn, with his
good-humoured laugh. "We're happy in ours, I hope they're happy in
theirs. Then, as soon as Daisy can be ready, sir?"

"Yes, as soon as Daisy can be ready," assented Medland.

When, after thanks and some more rose-coloured prophecies, they were
gone together, he rose and, hands in pockets, paced up and down the
narrow room.

"Really, young Norburn has got the philosophy of it," he mused.