placent knuckles.

"I never knew a man," I exclaimed, "who had better reasons for wanting
to live!"

A handsome youth mused: "Yes, his wife is very beautiful--but it
doesn't follow--"

And then some one nudged him, for they knew I was Halidon's friend.

THE PRETEXT

I

MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed with
a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence up the
narrow stairs to her bedroom.

Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so
quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry for,
save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without fostering
elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by
her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression in her girlish flight
upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her
throbs and her blushes.

Her blushes? Was she really blushing?

She approached the cramped eagle-topped mirror above her plain prim
dressing-table: just such a meagre concession to the weakness of the
flesh as every old-fashioned house in Wentworth counted among its
relics. The face reflected in this unflattering surface--for even the
mirrors of Wentworth erred on the side of depreciation--did not seem,
at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the tenderer
emotions, and its owner blushed more deeply as the fact was forced upon
her.

Her fair hair had grown too thin--it no longer quite hid the blue veins
in her candid forehead--a forehead that one seemed to see turned toward
professorial desks, in large bare halls where a snowy winter light fell
uncompromisingly on rows of "thoughtful women." Her mouth was thin,
too, and a little strained; her lips were too pale; and there were
lines in the corners of her eyes. It was a face which had grown
middle-aged while it waited for the joys of youth.

Well--but if she could still blush? Instinctively she drew back a
little, so that her scrutiny became less microscopic, and the pretty
lingering pink threw a veil over her pallor, the hollows in her
temples, the faint wrinkles of inexperience about her lips and eyes.
How a little colour helped! It made her eyes so deep and shining. She
saw now why bad women rouged.... Her redness deepened at the thought.

But suddenly she noticed for the first time that the collar of her
dress was cut too low. It showed the shrunken lines of the throat. She
rummaged f