not quite sure whether these pretty things will suit her charming
face."

"Oh!" Bruce's own face fell, and for once Chloe felt an impulse of
compassion with another's disappointment.

"At any rate they are very dainty and girlish," she said, handing back
the case. "I congratulate you on your taste, Bruce. You might very
easily have got more elaborate ones--like some of mine--which would have
been very inappropriate to a girl."

"Why do you always speak of yourself as though you were a middle-aged
woman, Chloe?" asked her brother with a sudden curiosity. "You seem to
forget you are younger than I--why, you are only twenty-six now."

"Am I?" Her smile was baffling. "In actual years I believe I am. But in
thought, in feeling, in everything, I am a hundred years older than you,
Bruce."

Cherry's return to her uncle's side with a request to him to take out
"the dangly thing what tickles my ear" cut short Bruce's reply, and
breakfast proceeded tranquilly, while the sun shone gaily and the roses
for which Cherry Orchard was famous scented the soft, warm air which
floated in through the widely-opened windows.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Anstice was in a quandary on this beautiful summer morning.

Before he had pledged his word to Cheniston to stand aside and leave the
field open to his rival, he had gladly accepted Iris' invitation to her
birthday dinner and dance; but the thought of the dances she had
promised him had changed from a source of anticipatory delight to one of
the sheerest torment.

It had not been easy to avoid her. There had been hours in which he had
had to restrain himself by every means in his power from rushing over to
Greengates to implore her pardon for his discourtesy, and to beg her to
receive him back into her most desirable favour. It had cost him an
effort whose magnitude had left him cold and sick to greet her distantly
on the rare occasions of their meeting; and many times he had been ready
to throw his promise to the winds, to repudiate the horrible bargain he
had struck, and to tell her plainly in so many words that he loved her
and wanted her for his wife.

But he never yielded to the temptation. He had pledged his word, and
somehow the thought that he was paying the price, now, for Hilda Ryder's
untimely death, brought, ever and again, a fleeting sense of comfort as
though the sacrifice of his own chance of happiness was an offering laid
at her feet in expiat