by a score of years as he was
represented in the glass in that cold grey morning light. While his soul
was what it was, why should he have been encumbered with that withering
carcase, without the ability to shift it off for another, as his ideal
Beloved had so frequently done?

By reason of her mother's illness Avice was now living in the house,
and, on going downstairs, he found that they were to breakfast en
tete-a-tete. She was not then in the room, but she entered in the course
of a few minutes. Pierston had already heard that the widow felt better
this morning, and elated by the prospect of sitting with Avice at this
meal he went forward to her joyously. As soon as she saw him in the full
stroke of day from the window she started; and he then remembered that
it was their first meeting under the solar rays.

She was so overcome that she turned and left the room as if she had
forgotten something; when she re-entered she was visibly pale. She
recovered herself, and apologized. She had been sitting up the night
before the last, she said, and was not quite so well as usual.

There may have been some truth in this; but Pierston could not get over
that first scared look of hers. It was enough to give daytime stability
to his night views of a possible tragedy lurking in this wedding
project. He determined that, at any cost to his heart, there should be
no misapprehension about him from this moment.

'Miss Pierston,' he said as they sat down, 'since it is well you should
know all the truth before we go any further, that there may be no
awkward discoveries afterwards, I am going to tell you something about
myself--if you are not too distressed to hear it?'

'No--let me hear it.'

'I was once the lover of your mother, and wanted to marry her, only she
wouldn't, or rather couldn't, marry me.'

'O how strange!' said the girl, looking from him to the breakfast
things, and from the breakfast things to him. 'Mother has never told me
that. Yet of course, you might have been. I mean, you are old enough.'

He took the remark as a satire she had not intended. 'O yes--quite old
enough,' he said grimly. 'Almost too old.'

'Too old for mother? How's that?'

'Because I belonged to your grandmother.'

'No? How can that be?'

'I was her lover likewise. I should have married her if I had gone
straight on instead of round the corner.'

'But you couldn't have been, Mr. Pierston! You are not old enough? Why,
how old are you?--y