ing well,
his eyes were heavy with sleeplessness, and the Major had been unusually
exasperating at breakfast that morning, so that he started with a jaded,
worn-out feeling that would not wholly yield even to the excitement
of this long-expected meeting with Freda. When he found himself in the
great drawing-room at Lord Probyn's house, amid a buzz of talk and a
crowd of strange faces, he was seized with one of those sudden attacks
of shyness to which he was always liable. In fact, he had been so long
alone with the old Major that this plunge into society was too great a
reaction, and the very thing he had longed for became a torture to him.

Freda was at the other end of the room talking to Keith Collins, the
well-known member for Codrington, whose curious but attractive face was
known to all the world through the caricatures of it in 'Punch.' I knew
that she saw Derrick, and that he instantly perceived her, and that a
miserable sense of separation, of distance, of hopelessness overwhelmed
him as he looked. After all, it was natural enough. For two years he
had thought of Freda night and day; in his unutterably dreary life her
memory had been his refreshment, his solace, his companion. Now he was
suddenly brought face to face, not with the Freda of his dreams, but
with a fashionable, beautifully dressed, much-sought girl, and he felt
that a gulf lay between them; it was the gulf of experience. Freda's
life in society, the whirl of gaiety, the excitement and success which
she had been enjoying throughout the season, and his miserable monotony
of companionship with his invalid father, of hard work and weary
disappointment, had broken down the bond of union that had once existed
between them. From either side they looked at each other--Freda with a
wondering perplexity, Derrick with a dull grinding pain at his heart.

Of course they spoke to each other; but I fancy the merest platitudes
passed between them. Somehow they had lost touch, and a crowded London
drawing-room was hardly the place to regain it.

"So your novel is really out," I heard her say to him in that deep,
clear voice of hers. "I like the design on the cover."

"Oh, have you read the book?" said Derrick, colouring.

"Well, no," she said truthfully. "I wanted to read it, but my father
wouldn't let me--he is very particular about what we read."

That frank but not very happily worded answer was like a stab to poor
Derrick. He had given to the world then a