it at
any time to gain her! He would swear it now, if thereby he could touch
her--but nobody could touch her, she was cold-hearted!

And memories crowded on him with the fresh, sweet savour of the spring
wind-memories of his courtship.

In the spring of the year 1881 he was visiting his old school-fellow and
client, George Liversedge, of Branksome, who, with the view of developing
his pine-woods in the neighbourhood of Bournemouth, had placed the
formation of the company necessary to the scheme in Soames's hands. Mrs.
Liversedge, with a sense of the fitness of things, had given a musical
tea in his honour. Later in the course of this function, which Soames, no
musician, had regarded as an unmitigated bore, his eye had been caught by
the face of a girl dressed in mourning, standing by herself. The lines
of her tall, as yet rather thin figure, showed through the wispy,
clinging stuff of her black dress, her black-gloved hands were crossed in
front of her, her lips slightly parted, and her large, dark eyes wandered
from face to face. Her hair, done low on her neck, seemed to gleam above
her black collar like coils of shining metal. And as Soames stood
looking at her, the sensation that most men have felt at one time or
another went stealing through him--a peculiar satisfaction of the senses,
a peculiar certainty, which novelists and old ladies call love at first
sight. Still stealthily watching her, he at once made his way to his
hostess, and stood doggedly waiting for the music to cease.

"Who is that girl with yellow hair and dark eyes?" he asked.

"That--oh! Irene Heron. Her father, Professor Heron, died this year.
She lives with her stepmother. She's a nice girl, a pretty girl, but no
money!"

"Introduce me, please," said Soames.

It was very little that he found to say, nor did he find her responsive
to that little. But he went away with the resolution to see her again.
He effected his object by chance, meeting her on the pier with her
stepmother, who had the habit of walking there from twelve to one of a
forenoon. Soames made this lady's acquaintance with alacrity, nor was it
long before he perceived in her the ally he was looking for. His keen
scent for the commercial side of family life soon told him that Irene
cost her stepmother more than the fifty pounds a year she brought her; it
also told him that Mrs. Heron, a woman yet in the prime of life, desired
to be married again. The strange ripening