ey was
bathed in romance of the most singular kind, and the precious fluid ran
off him like water off a duck's back.

II

Ten years ago on a Thursday afternoon in July, Lionel Woolley, as he
walked up through the new park at Bursley to his celibate rooms in Park
Terrace, was making addition sums out of various items connected with
the institution of marriage. Bursley is next door to Hanbridge, and
Lionel happened then to be cashier of the Bursley branch of the bank. He
had in mind two possible wives, each of whom possessed advantages which
appealed to him, and he was unable to decide between them by any
mathematical process. Suddenly, from a glazed shelter near the empty
bandstand, there emerged in front of him one of the delectable creatures
who had excited his fancy. May Lawton was twenty-eight, an orphan, and a
schoolmistress. She, too, had celibate rooms in Park Terrace, and it
was owing to this coincidence that Lionel had made her acquaintance six
months previously. She was not pretty, but she was tall, straight, well
dressed, well educated, and not lacking in experience; and she had a
little money of her own.

'Well, Mr. Woolley,' she said easily, stopping for him as she raised her
sunshade, 'how satisfied you look!'

'It's the sight of you,' he replied, without a moment's hesitation.

He had a fine assured way with women (he need not have envied a curate
accustomed to sewing meetings), and May Lawton belonged to the type of
girl whose demeanour always challenges the masculine in a man. Gazing at
her, Lionel was swiftly conscious of several things: the piquancy of her
snub nose, the brightness of her smile, at once defiant and wistful, the
lingering softness of her gloved hand, and the extraordinary charm of
her sunshade, which matched her dress and formed a sort of canopy and
frame for that intelligent, tantalizing face. He remembered that of late
he and she had grown very intimate; and it came upon him with a shock,
as though he had just opened a telegram which said so, that May, and not
the other girl, was his destined mate. And he thought of her fortune,
tiny but nevertheless useful, and how clever she was, and how
inexplicably different from the rest of her sex, and how she would adorn
his house, and set him off, and help him in his career. He heard himself
saying negligently to friends: 'My wife speaks French like a native. Of
course, my wife has travelled a great deal. My wife has thoroughly
studi