confidante; he was egregiously
proud of his handsome boy. And the day of the young romance--of the
great passion--of those sordid "little fires" which beckon to men whose
nature craves for warmth and whose "yule is cold"--that day was past.
"Love is one thing and marriage another," he had once said, without
really meaning it; but he had spoken truer than he knew. Moreover, the
shocking statement was not nearly so awful as it seemed. The very
conditions of married life are fatal to love, as love is understood by
the yet unmarried lovers--insanely sanguine, of human necessity--asking
the impossible, and no blame to them, because they are made so; but no
matter. That thing which comes afterwards, to the right-minded and
well-intentioned, and which they don't think worth calling love--that
sober, faithful, forbearing friendship, that mutual need which endures
all the time, and is ever more deeply satisfied and satisfying instead
of less--is no bad substitute.

Yet how the world of imagination dominates the world of fact! How much
fairer the unseen than the seen! How much more precious the good we
have not than the good we have! In his private desk in his private
study, Guthrie kept--just as old Mr Pennycuick had kept his
valentine--a faded, spotted, ochre-tinted photograph of poor little
Lily in the saucer bonnet with lace "brides" to it that she was married
in; and when Wellwood was humming with shooting parties and the like,
and its lady doing the honours of the house with all the forethought
and devotion that she could bring to the task, the stout squire would
be sitting in his sanctum under lock and key, gazing at that sweet
girl-face which had the luck to be dead and gone. Lily in the
retrospect was the faultless woman--the ideal wife and love's young
dream in one. "I have had my day," was the thought of his heart, as he
looked across the gulf of strenuous, chequered, disappointing years to
that idyll of the far past which her pictured form brought back to him.
"Whatever is lacking now, I HAVE known the fullness of love and
bliss--that there is such a thing as a perfect union between man and
woman, rare as it may be." It will be remembered that he was married to
her, actually, for a period not exceeding five weeks in all.

And Deborah Pennycuick, who would have made such a magnificent lady of
Wellwood--who was, in fact, asked to take the post before it was
offered to the cousin--she came to spend Christmas under his r