ity had
scarcely entered. Castera-Verduzan! Prescott! Ayliffe! What folly it had
been for him to make his own plans for her and Alan. Yet it had seemed
so obvious and so easy that these two should fall in love with each
other. Michael wondered whether he were specially privileged in being
able to see through to a sister's heart, whether other brothers went
blindly on without an inkling that their sisters were loved. It was
astonishing to think that the grave Prescott had stepped so far and so
rashly from his polite seclusion as to accept the risk of ridicule for
proposing to a girl whose mother's love for a friend of his own he had
spent his life in guarding. Michael put out the lamp and, lighting a
candle, went along the corridor to bed. From the far end he heard
Stella's voice calling to him and turned back to ask her what she
wanted. She was sitting up in bed very wide-eyed, and, in that dainty
room of diminutive buds and nosegays all winking in the soft
candlelight, she seemed with her brown hair tied up with a scarlet bow
someone disproportionately large and wild, yet someone whom for all her
largeness and wildness it would still be a joy devotedly to cherish and
protect.

"Michael, I've been thinking about what you said," she began, "and you
mustn't get cranky. I wish you wouldn't bother so much about what you're
going to be. It will end in your simply being unhappy."

"I don't really bother a great deal," Michael assured her. "But I do
feel a sort of responsibility for being a nobody, so very definitely a
nobody."

"The people who ought to have felt that responsibility were mother and
father," said Stella.

"Yes, logically," Michael agreed. "But I think father did feel the
responsibility rather heavily, and it's a sort of loyalty I have for him
which makes me so determined to justify myself."

That night the equinoctial gales began. Stella and Michael had only two
or three walks more down the wide glades where the fallen leaves
trundled and swirled, and then it would be time to leave this forest
house. Raoul did not manage to come back to Compiegne in time to say
good-bye, and so at the moment of departure they took leave of old
Ursule and the cottage very sadly, for it seemed, so desolate and gusty
was the October morning, that never again would they possess for their
own that magical corner of the world.

The equinoctial gales died away in a flood of rain, and the fine weather
came back. London welcomed