same little white-clad figure
seated at the foot of the great table in the dining-hall.

He had seen her in his mind's eye doing those little housewifely duties
that the mistresses of Hurst Dormer had always loved to do, her slender
fingers busy with the rare and delicate old china, or the
lavender-scented linen, or else in the wonderful old garden, the
gracious little mistress of all and of his heart.

And now she sat drooping like a wilted lily beside the green pond,
because of her love for another man, and his honest heart ached that it
should be so.

"Marjorie!" he said.

She lifted a tear-stained face and held out her hand' to him silently.

He patted her hand gently, as one pats the hand of a child. "Is--is it
so bad, little girl? Do you care for him so much?"

"Better than my life!" she said. "Oh, if you knew!"

"I see," he said quietly. He sat staring at the green waters, stirred
now and again by the fin of a lazy carp. He realised that there would be
no sweet girlish, golden-haired little mistress for Hurst Dormer, and
the realisation hurt him badly.

The girl seemed to have crept a little closer to him, as for comfort and
protection.

"She has made up her mind, and nothing will change it. She wants you
to--to marry me. She's told me so a hundred times. She won't listen to
anything else; she says you--you care for me, Hugh."

"Supposing I care so much, little girl, that I want your happiness above
everything in this world. Supposing--I clear out?" he said--"clear right
away, go to Africa, or somewhere or other?"

"She would make me wait till you came back, and you'd have to come back,
Hugh, because there is always Hurst Dormer. There's no way out for me,
none. If only--only you were married; that is the only thing that would
have saved me!"

"But I'm not!"

She sighed. "If only you were, if only you could say to her, 'I can't
ask Marjorie to marry me, because I am already married!' It sounds
rubbish, doesn't it, Hugh; but if it were only true!"

"Supposing--I did say it?"

"Oh, Hugh, but--" She looked up at him quickly. "But it would be a
lie!"

"I know, but lies aren't always the awful things they are supposed to
be--if one told a lie to help a friend, for instance, such a lie might
be forgiven, eh?"

"But--" She was trembling; she looked eagerly into his eyes, into her
cheeks had come a flush, into her eyes the brightness of a new, though
as yet vague, hope. "It--it sounds so impossible