, and how in his eyes a woman's
love outweighs the idle glitter of a social success. Oh! Magdalen, I'm
beginning to feel I'm not worthy of Wentworth. I've always liked being
admired, so different from him. I did not know there were men so
high-minded as he. He makes me feel very petty beside him. And he is so
humble. He says I must not idealise him, that he does not _wish_ it, for
though he may not be worse or better than I think he is only too
conscious of his many deficiencies. But I can't help it. Who could?"

And Fay let fall a tear.

"We needs must love the highest when we see it."

But the highest some of us can see is the nearest molehill.

What Michael and the Duke had failed to do for Fay Wentworth was
accomplishing.

"You are made for each other," said Magdalen, with conviction. "Every
day shows me that you and Wentworth bring out the best in each other.
Perhaps, gradually, you will keep nothing back from each other, tell
each other everything."

"He tells me everything now," said Fay. "He trusts me entirely."

"And you?" said Magdalen. "Do you tell him everything?"

* * * * *

Wentworth, too, had reached the conviction that he and Fay were made for
each other. He might have starved out the deeper love, the truth and
tenderness of a sincerer nature, if it had been drawn towards him. He
had often imagined himself as being the recipient of the lavished
devotion of a woman beautiful, humble, exquisite and noble, whose truth
was truth itself, and had vaguely wondered why she had not come into his
life. But perhaps if he had met such a woman, and if she had loved him
as he pined to be loved, he would have become suspicious of her, and
would have left her after many vacillations. He did not instinctively
recognise humility and nobility when he met them, because they bore but
slight resemblance to the stiff lay figures which represented those
qualities in his mind. To meet them in reality would have been to him
bewilderment, disappointment, disillusion.

Fay was not only what he seemed to want, what he had feebly longed for.
She was more than this. Her nature was the complement of his. A lack of
shrewdness, of mental grasp, a certain silliness were absolutely
essential to the maintenance of a lifelong devotion to him. Wentworth
had found the right woman to give him what he wanted. Fay had found the
right man.

Love, which had been knocking urgently at their doors for so man