Poor
prisoner! It has so few opportunities."

She sighed deeply, and her father saw, with distress, the approach of a
sentimental mood which he deplored as un-English, and feared as
unmanageable.

"What is this languor, this inability to rouse myself, to feel the least
interest in things or people?" she continued. "I am not ill, and yet I
have scarcely the strength to regret my lassitude."

"What does it mean?"

He put his hand upon her jacket sleeve.

"Is this warm enough?" he said. "The autumn is treacherous. You are
careful, I hope."

She glanced out of the window and up at the clouds which, grey, heavy,
and impenetrable, moved, darkening all things as they went across the
sky.

"I wish it would rain! I like to be out when it rains!"

"A strange fancy," said her father, "but tastes, even odd ones, give a
charm to life, whereas passions--" he put some stress upon the word and
repeated it, "passions destroy it."

"Marshire, at any rate, does not seem to possess either!"

"Well, a man must begin at some point, and, at some point, he must
change. He admires and respects you, my darling, so we may hardly
quarrel with his judgment."

Sara shrugged her shoulders and turned her glance away from the few
carriages filled with invalids or elderly women which were still
lingering in the Row.

"Some people," said she, "are driven by their passions, others, the
smaller number, by their virtues. Marshire has asked me to marry him
because it is his duty to choose a wife from his own circle. I have no
illusions in the matter. Nor, I fancy, has he. We have talked, of
course, of love and Platonism till both love and Platonism became a
weariness!"

"Very far indeed am I from thinking you just. I have had an extremely
kind note from the Duchess."

"An old tyrant! She wants a daughter-in-law who will play piquet with
her in the evenings, and feed her peacocks in the morning. She is tired
of poor Miss Wilmington. An old tyrant!"

"She hopes to hear soon when the marriage is to take place. I wish I
could tell her the day. I do so long to have it fixed."

"Dear papa," she said, with a charming smile, "you are anxious, I see,
to be rid of me. I will write to him to-night."

"And to what effect?"

"The wisest."

"That means the happiest, too?" he asked with anxiety.

"For you and him, I hope. As for me--am I a woman who could, by any
chance, be both happy and wise at the same moment?"

Her existence was very soli