stood up before her fire, and
stretched up her arms so that her long hair fell back like a cloud around
her, "only he is a different sort of man to what I had pictured him. It
will, perhaps, not be such an easy matter to win a man like that."

She went to bed and dreamt--not of Sir John Kynaston--but of the man
whose pictured face once seen had haunted her ever since.

CHAPTER V.

"LITTLE PITCHERS."

Once at least in a man's life, if only for a brief space, he reverences
the saint in the woman he desires. He may love and pursue again and
again, but she who has power to hold him back, who can make him tremble
instead of woo, who can make him silent when he feels eloquent, and
restrained when most impassioned, has won from him what never again can
be given.

It was an easier matter to win him than Vera thought.

A week later Sir John Kynaston sat alone by his library fire, after
breakfast, and owned to himself that he had fallen hopelessly and
helplessly in love with Vera Nevill.

This was all the more remarkable because Sir John was not a very young
man, and that he was, moreover, not of a nature to do things rashly or
impulsively.

He was, on the contrary, of a slow and hesitating disposition. He was in
the habit of weighing his words and his actions before he spoke or acted,
his mind was tardy to take in new thoughts and new ideas, and he was
cautious and almost sluggish in taking any steps in a strange and
unaccustomed direction.

Nevertheless, in this matter of Vera, he had succumbed to his fate with
all the uncalculating blindness of a boy in his teens.

Vera was like no other woman he had ever seen; she was as far removed
above common young-ladyhood as Raphael's Madonnas are beyond and above
Greuze's simpering maidens; there could be no other like her--she was
a queen, a goddess among women.

From the very first moment that he had caught sight of her on the terrace
outside his house her absolute mastery over him had begun. Her rare
beauty, her quiet smile, her slow, indolent movements, the very tones of
her rich, low voice, all impressed him in a strange and wonderful manner.
She seemed to him to be the incarnation of everything that was pure and
elevated in womanhood. To have imagined that such a one as she could have
thought of his wealth or his position would have been the rankest
blasphemy in his eyes.

He raised her up on a pedestal of his own creating, and then he fell down