le him.

It was one of those ripe and mellow afternoons that sometimes colour
London with their golden light at this time of the year, and produce
those marvellous sunset effects which, if they were not known to be made
up of kitchen coal-smoke and animal exhalations, would be rapturously
applauded. Behind the perpendicular, oblique, zigzagged, and curved zinc
'tall-boys,' that formed a grey pattern not unlike early Gothic numerals
against the sky, the men and women on the tops of the omnibuses saw an
irradiation of topaz hues, darkened here and there into richest russet.

There had been a sharp shower during the afternoon, and Pierston--who
had to take care of himself--had worn a pair of goloshes on his short
walk in the street. He noiselessly entered the studio, inside which
some gleams of the same mellow light had managed to creep, and where he
guessed he should find his prospective wife and mother-in-law awaiting
him with tea. But only Avice was there, seated beside the teapot of
brown delf, which, as artists, they affected, her back being toward him.
She was holding her handkerchief to her eyes, and he saw that she was
weeping silently.

In another moment he perceived that she was weeping over a book. By this
time she had heard him, and came forward. He made it appear that he
had not noticed her distress, and they discussed some arrangements of
furniture. When he had taken a cup of tea she went away, leaving the
book behind her.

Pierston took it up. The volume was an old school-book; Stievenard's
'Lectures Francaises,' with her name in it as a pupil at Sandbourne
High School, and date-markings denoting lessons taken at a comparatively
recent time, for Avice had been but a novice as governess when he
discovered her.

For a school-girl--which she virtually was--to weep over a school-book
was strange. Could she have been affected by some subject in the
readings? Impossible. Pierston fell to thinking, and zest died for the
process of furnishing, which he had undertaken so gaily. Somehow, the
bloom was again disappearing from his approaching marriage. Yet he
loved Avice more and more tenderly; he feared sometimes that in the
solicitousness of his affection he was spoiling her by indulging her
every whim.

He looked round the large and ambitious apartment, now becoming clouded
with shades, out of which the white and cadaverous countenances of his
studies, casts, and other lumber peered meditatively at him, as if