er than
I." And Maud, half ashamed of this suggestive remark, ran away. Her
gay candour proved to me--perhaps to others besides me--the girl's
entire free-heartedness. The frank innocence of childhood was still
hers.

Lord Ravenel looked after her and sighed. "It is good to marry early;
do you not think so, Mr. Fletcher?"

I told him--(I was rather sorry after I had said it, if one ought to be
sorry for having, when questioned, given one's honest opinion)--I told
him that I thought those happiest who found their happiness early, but
that I did not see why happiness should be rejected because it was the
will of Providence that it should not be found till late.

"I wonder," he said, dreamily, "I wonder whether I shall ever find it."

I asked him--it was by an impulse irresistible--why he had never
married?

"Because I never found any woman either to love or to believe in.
Worse," he added, bitterly, "I did not think there lived the woman who
could be believed in."

We had come out of the beech-wood and were standing by the low
churchyard wall; the sun glittered on the white marble head-stone on
which was inscribed, "Muriel Joy Halifax."

Lord Ravenel leaned over the wall, his eyes fixed upon that little
grave. After a while, he said, sighing:

"Do you know, I have thought sometimes that, had she lived, I could
have loved--I might have married--that child!"

Here Maud sprang towards us. In her playful tyranny, which she loved
to exercise and he to submit to, she insisted on knowing what Lord
Ravenel was talking about.

"I was saying," he answered, taking both her hands and looking down
into her bright, unshrinking eyes, "I was saying, how dearly I loved
your sister Muriel."

"I know that," and Maud became grave at once. "I know you care for me
because I am like my sister Muriel."

"If it were so, would you be sorry or glad?"

"Glad, and proud too. But you said, or you were going to say,
something more. What was it?"

He hesitated long, then answered:

"I will tell you another time."

Maud went away, rather cross and dissatisfied, but evidently suspecting
nothing. For me, I began to be seriously uneasy about her and Lord
Ravenel.

Of all kinds of love, there is one which common sense and romance have
often combined to hold obnoxious, improbable, or ridiculous, but which
has always seemed to me the most real and pathetic form that the
passion ever takes--I mean, love in spite of great dispari