box.

CHAPTER XXI

"I SHALL FORGET HER"

Restless and unhappy, Hugh Alston had returned to Hurst Dormer, to find
there that everything was flat, stale, and unprofitable. He had an
intense love for the home of his birth and his boyhood, but just now it
seemed to mean less to him than it ever had before. He watched moodily
the workmen at their work on those alterations and restorations that he
had been planning with interested enthusiasm for many months past. Now
he did not seem to care whether they were done or no.

"Why," he demanded of the vision of her that came to him of nights, "why
the dickens don't you leave me alone? I don't want you. I don't want to
remember you. I am content to forget that I ever saw you, and I wish to
Heaven you would leave me alone!"

But she was always there.

He tried to reason with himself; he attempted to analyse Love.

"One cannot love a thing," he told himself, "unless one has every reason
to believe that it is perfection. A man, when he is deeply in love with
a woman, must regard her as his ideal of womanhood. In his eyes she must
be perfection; she must be flawless, even her faults he will not
recognise as faults, but as perfections that are perhaps a little beyond
his understanding--that's all right. Now in the case of Joan, I see in
her nothing to admire beyond the loveliness of her face, the grace of
her, the sweet voice of her and--oh, her whole personality! But I know
her to be mean-spirited and uncharitable, unforgiving, ungenerous. I
know her to be all these, and yet--"

"Lady Linden, sir, and Miss Marjorie Linden!"

They had not met for weeks. Her ladyship had driven over in the large,
comfortable carriage. "Give me a horse or, better still, two
horses--things with brains, created by the Almighty, and not a thing
that goes piff, piff, piff, and leaves an ungodly smell along the roads,
to say nothing of the dust!"

So she had come here behind two fine horses, sleek and overfed.

"Hello!" she said.

"Hello!" said Hugh, and kissed her, and so the feud between them was
ended.

"You are looking," her ladyship said, "rotten!"

"I am looking exactly as I feel. How are you, Marjorie?" He held the
small hand in his, and looked kindly, as he must ever look, into her
pretty round face. Because she was blushing with the joy of seeing him,
and because her eyes were bright as twin stars, he concluded that she
was happy, and ascribed her happiness, not unnaturally c