man drily. "You love the girl, and he's in
the running with you. What more?"

Lewis groaned. "How can I talk about loving her when my love is such a
trifling thing that it doesn't nerve me to action? I tell you I love
her body and soul. I live for her. The whole world is full of her.
She is never a second out of my thoughts. And yet I am so little of a
man that I let her come near death and never try to save her."

"But, confound it, man, it may have been mere absence of mind. You were
always an extraordinarily plucky chap." Wratislaw spoke irritably, for
it seemed to him sheer folly.

Lewis looked at him imploringly. "Can you not understand?" he cried.

Wratislaw did understand, and suddenly. The problem was subtler than he
had thought. Weakness was at the core of it, weakness revealed in
self-deception and self-accusation alike, the weakness of the finical
dreamer, the man with the unrobust conscience. But the weakness which
Lewis arraigned himself on was the very obvious failing of the diffident
and the irresolute. Wratislaw tried the path of boisterous
encouragement.

"Get up, you old fool, and come down to the house. You a coward! You
are simply a romancer with an unfortunate knack of tragedy." The man
must be laughed out of this folly. If he were not he would show the
self-accusing front to the world, and the Manorwaters, Alice,
Stocks--all save his chosen intimates--would credit him with a cowardice
of which he had no taint.

Arthur and George, resigned now to the inevitable lady, had seen in the
incident only the anxiety of a man for his beloved, and just a hint of
the ungenerous in his treatment of Mr. Stocks. They were not prepared
for the silent tragic figure which Wratislaw brought with him.

Arthur had a glint of the truth, but the obtuse George saw nothing. "Do
you know that you are going to have the Wisharts for neighbours for a
couple of months yet? Old Wishart has taken Glenavelin from the end of
August."

This would have been pleasant hearing at another time, but now it simply
drove home the nail of his bitter reflections. Alice would be near him,
a terrible reproach-she, the devotee of strength and competence. He
could not win her, and it is characteristic of the man that he had
ceased to think of Mr. Stocks as his rival. He would lose her to no
rival; to his ragged incapacity alone would his ill fortune be due.

He struggled to act the part of the cheerful host, and Wratislaw watched
his