o see me in Paris some time next year. By
the bye, you don't think he will disapprove of me?"

"Do you imagine Mr. Jacks----"

"What were you going to say?"

Irene had stopped as if for want of the right word She was reflecting.

"It never struck me," she said, "that he would wish to regulate my
choice of friends. Yet I suppose it would be within his right?"

"Conventionally speaking, undoubtedly."

"Don't think I am in uncertainty about this particular instance," said
Irene. "No, he has already told me that he liked you. But of the
general question, I had never thought."

"My dear, who does, or can, think before marriage of all that it
involves? After all, the pleasures of life consist so largely in the
unexpected."

Irene paced a few yards in silence, and when she spoke again it was of
quite another subject.

Whether this sojourn with her experienced and philosophical friend made
her better able to face the meeting with Arnold Jacks was not quite
certain. At moments she fancied so; she saw her position as wholly
reasonable, void of anxiety; she was about to marry the man she liked
and respected--safest of all forms of marriage. But there came
troublesome moods of misgiving. It did not flatter her self-esteem to
think of herself as excluded from the number of those who are capable
of love; even in Helen Borisoff's view, the elect, the fortunate. Of
love, she had thought more in this last week or two than in all her
years gone by. Assuredly, she knew it not, this glory of the poets. Yet
she could inspire it in others; at all events, in one, whose rhythmic
utterance of the passion ever and again came back to her mind.

A temptation had assailed her (but she resisted it) to repeat those
verses of Piers Otway to her friend. And in thinking of them, she half
reproached herself for the total silence she had preserved towards
their author. Perhaps he was uncertain whether the verses had ever
reached her. It seemed unkind. There would have been no harm in letting
him know that she had read the lines, and--as poetry--liked them.

Was her temper prosaic? It would at any time have surprised her to be
told so. Owing to her father's influence, she had given much time to
scientific studies, but she knew herself by no means defective in
appreciation of art and literature. By whatever accident, the friends
of her earlier years had been notable rather for good sense and good
feeling than for aesthetic fervour; the one exce