should look back now and then to some of the
many tender scenes that had passed between them; but as time went on,
these memory-pictures grew more faint. The fast-succeeding events and
the new experiences of her married life crowded swiftly and thickly upon
her, until she began to look upon the past more as a dream than as a
reality. Vane's figure receded rapidly into the background of her life,
and, as it did so, it seemed in some way to become spiritualised, lifted
above and beyond the world-sphere in which it was now her destiny to
move.

They got back to England a few weeks before the season began, and, after
a day or two in London for some necessary shopping, they went down to
Garthorne Abbey, one of the finest old seats in the Midland counties,
standing on a wooded slope in the green border which fringes the Black
Country, and facing the meadows and woodlands which stretch away down to
the banks of the Severn, beyond which rise the broken, picturesque
outlines of the Herefordshire Hills.

Here Enid Garthorne spent an entirely delightful week exploring the
stately home and the splendid domain of which she would one day be
mistress. Day after day in the early clear Spring morning, she would go
up alone on to a sort of terrace-walk which had been made round the roof
behind the stone balustrade which ran all round the house, and look out
over the green, well-wooded, softly undulating country, her heart filled
with a delighted pride and the consciousness, or, at any rate, the
belief, that after all the cloud which had come between her and Vane had
had a silver, nay, a golden lining, and that, so far, at least,
everything had been for the best.

As she looked to the eastward, she could see stretched along the horizon
a low, dun-coloured line which was not cloud. It was the smoke of the
Black Country, and underneath it hundreds and hundreds of men, aye, and
if she had known it, women, too, were toiling in forge and mine and
factory, earning the thousands which made life so easy and so pleasant
for her. To the westward were the low-lying meadows, the rolling
corn-lands, and the dark strips and patches of wood and coppice which
lay for miles on three sides of the Home Park, and beyond these she
caught bright gleams of the silver Severn rippling away to the distant
Bristol Channel; then, beyond this again, the rising uplands which
culminated in the irregular terraces of the Abberley Hills.

She knew nothing of it at the