o it, for as you know
women can be uncommonly cruel sometimes, and these creatures here aren't
by any means charitably disposed towards her."

"You allow Miss Wayne to visit her?"

"Yes--and I welcome her to my house on the rare occasions she honours me
by entering it," said Sir Richard with evident sincerity; and Anstice
felt oddly gratified by the other man's speech.

A clock striking seven brought him to his feet in genuine dismay.

"Seven o'clock! I'd no idea it was so late! Pray excuse me inflicting
myself on you all this time."

"Must you go?" Sir Richard rose too, and stood regarding the tall,
loosely built figure with something like admiration. "Well, you're a
busy man, I know; and if you really must go I'll not detain you. But
you'll come in again, won't you? Come to dinner--Iris shall send you a
note--and drop in for a smoke any evening you're at liberty."

The invitation so heartily given was accepted with a pleasure to which
Anstice had long been a stranger; and then he said good-bye to his kind
host and left Greengates feeling that he had found two unexpectedly
congenial friends in Iris Wayne and her father.

He had been deeply, genuinely interested in Sir Richard's story, that
unhappy story in which Chloe Carstairs figured so tragically; yet as he
made his way homewards between the blossoming hedgerows his mind dwelt
upon another woman, a younger, happier woman than the pale mistress of
Cherry Orchard. And the face which floated before his eyes in the
starlit spring dusk was the laughing, grey-eyed face of Iris Wayne.

CHAPTER V

As the weeks passed Anstice's acquaintance with the Waynes ripened into
something which he found strangely pleasant.

Although he had long ago decided that for him the simple human things of
life, friendship, social intercourse with the world of men and women,
were, since that bygone Indian morning, forbidden, even his acquired
misanthropy was not proof against the kindly advances made to him by Sir
Richard and his daughter.

Busy as he was, he still found time to accept some of their invitations
to Greengates, and he and Sir Richard enjoyed a quiet chat over their
cigars now and again when by chance he had an evening to himself.

On their side the Waynes found him, each in his and her own degree, an
agreeable companion. Sir Richard approved of his quiet and reserved
manner, and was not inclined to quarrel with his occasional fits of
moodiness--for there were