ty face, the style was apt to
incline to the decorated rather than the classical. Lady Cinnamond
spoke kindly to Gerrard, and expressed the hope that he would look in
now and then, glancing the while from him to Honour as though anxious
to find something in their faces that might guide her what to say, but
in vain. In sheer bewilderment she appealed to her daughter when they
were alone.

"Tell me, Onora, did the poor fellow plead with you again to marry him?"

Honour turned quickly. "Oh no, mamma--how could he? Neither of us
could ever think of it now."

"That was what made you cry, then?"

"Mamma! why should it? He was telling me about poor Mr Charteris, and
I realised how little I had known him. I can say it to you, mamma--it
is a privilege to feel that such a man has cared for one."

"Then if he had lived you would have married him, my poor little one?"
cried her mother in dismay.

"How can I tell, mamma? One finds out these things too late. It is
always so, isn't it?"

"And the poor young man who is not dead?" there was a hint of
exasperation in Lady Cinnamond's voice.

"He doesn't dream of that sort of thing now. We shall always be
friends, but never anything more."

"My dearest little foolish one, there are moments when I would gladly
take you by the shoulders and shake you!" cried Lady Cinnamond in
vehement Spanish. Catching her daughter's astonished eye, she calmed
herself forcibly and spoke in English. "If you had seen that poor
young man's face as you left the room, as I did, Honour, you would know
what nonsense you are talking. Refuse him if you must, but don't keep
him in torture."

"Dear mamma, you don't understand. Things are different now----"

"From what they were when I was a girl? I agree! And I prefer them as
they used to be. There were your father and I, and his friends and my
family trying to prevent our marriage. There were other men in the
world, doubtless, but for me they simply did not exist. And we
married, and people considered us very romantic. But to be romantic
now, it seems, you must persist in remaining unmarried for the sake of
a very worthy young man for whom you cared not a straw when he was
alive!"

"I can't explain it, mamma. But one has one's feelings----"

"Quite so. And the poor Mr Gerrard has his also. But those you do not
consider."

Gerrard's ill-used feelings were still unhealed a week later, when Sir
Edmund Antony, learning of the immi