her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labours with
success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness
with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly
did not remember the look on her face--strange, passive, appealing--when
suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people
praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till
it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

Soames walked eastwards, mousing doggedly along on the shady side.

The house wanted doing, up, unless he decided to move into the country,
and build.

For the hundredth time that month he turned over this problem. There was
no use in rushing into things! He was very comfortably off, with an
increasing income getting on for three thousand a year; but his invested
capital was not perhaps so large as his father believed--James had a
tendency to expect that his children should be better off than they were.
'I can manage eight thousand easily enough,' he thought, 'without calling
in either Robertson's or Nicholl's.'

He had stopped to look in at a picture shop, for Soames was an 'amateur'
of pictures, and had a little-room in No. 62, Montpellier Square, full
of canvases, stacked against the wall, which he had no room to hang. He
brought them home with him on his way back from the City, generally after
dark, and would enter this room on Sunday afternoons, to spend hours
turning the pictures to the light, examining the marks on their backs,
and occasionally making notes.

They were nearly all landscapes with figures in the foreground, a sign of
some mysterious revolt against London, its tall houses, its interminable
streets, where his life and the lives of his breed and class were passed.
Every now and then he would take one or two pictures away with him in a
cab, and stop at Jobson's on his way into the City.

He rarely showed them to anyone; Irene, whose opinion he secretly
respected and perhaps for that reason never solicited, had only been into
the room on rare occasions, in discharge of some wifely duty. She was
not asked to look at the pictures, and she never did. To Soames this was
another grievance. He hated that pride of hers, and secretly dreaded it.

In the plate-glass window of the picture shop his image stood and looked
at him.

His sleek h