ividual
character, owing to the confusing effect of her likeness to a woman whom
he had valued too late. He could not help seeing in her all that he knew
of another, and veiling in her all that did not harmonize with his sense
of metempsychosis.

The girl seemed to think of nothing but the business in hand. She had
answered to the point, and was hardly aware of his sex or of his shape.

'I knew your mother, Avice,' he said. 'You remember my telling you so?'

'Yes.'

'Well--I have taken this house for two or three months, and you will be
very useful to me. You still live just outside the wall?'

'Yes, sir,' said the self-contained girl.

Demurely and dispassionately she turned to leave--this pretty creature
with features so still. There was something strange in seeing move
off thus that form which he knew passing well, she who was once so
throbbingly alive to his presence that, not many yards from this spot,
she had flung her arms round him and given him a kiss which, despised
in its freshness, had revived in him latterly as the dearest kiss of all
his life. And now this 'daps' of her mother (as they called her in the
dialect here), this perfect copy, why did she turn away?

'Your mother was a refined and well-informed woman, I think I remember?'

'She was, sir; everybody said so.'

'I hope you resemble her.'

She archly shook her head, and drew warily away.

'O! one thing more, Avice. I have not brought much linen, so you must
come to the house every day.'

'Very good, sir.'

'You won't forget that?'

'O no.'

Then he let her go. He was a town man, and she an artless islander, yet
he had opened himself out, like a sea-anemone, without disturbing the
epiderm of her nature. It was monstrous that a maiden who had assumed
the personality of her of his tenderest memory should be so impervious.
Perhaps it was he who was wanting. Avice might be Passion masking as
Indifference, because he was so many years older in outward show.

This brought him to the root of it. In his heart he was not a day older
than when he had wooed the mother at the daughter's present age. His
record moved on with the years, his sentiments stood still.

When he beheld those of his fellows who were defined as buffers and
fogeys--imperturbable, matter-of-fact, slightly ridiculous beings,
past masters in the art of populating homes, schools, and colleges, and
present adepts in the science of giving away brides--how he envied them,
ass