ng over the problems which fill the life he has missed. Tom
De Willoughby had had many of them. He had had no one to talk to whose
mind could have worked with his own. On winter nights, when Sheba had
been asleep, he had found himself gazing into the red embers of his wood
fire and pondering on the existence he might have led if fate had been
good to him.

"There must be happiness on the earth somewhere," he would say.
"Somewhere there ought to have been a woman I belonged to, and who
belonged to me. It ought all to have been as much nature as the rain
falling and the corn ripening in the sun. If we had met when we were
young things--on the very brink of it all--and smiled into each other's
eyes and taken each other's hands, and kissed each other's lips, we might
have ripened together like the corn. What is it that's gone wrong?" All
the warm normal affections of manhood, which might have remained
undeveloped and been cast away, had been lavished on the child Sheba. She
had represented his domestic circle.

"You mayn't know it, Sheba," he had said once to her, "but you're a
pretty numerous young person. You're a man's wife and family, and mother
and sisters, and at least half a dozen boys and girls."

All his thoughts had concentrated themselves upon her--all his
psychological problems had held her as their centre, all his ethical
reasonings had applied themselves to her.

"She's got to be happy," he said to himself, "and she's got to be strong
enough to stand up under unhappiness, if--if I should be taken away from
her. When the great thing that's--that's the meaning of it all--and the
reason of it--comes into her life, it ought to come as naturally as
summer does. If her poor child of a mother--Good Lord! Good Lord!"

And here he sat in the moonlight, and Delia Vanuxem's son was looking at
her with ardent, awakened young eyes.

How she listened as Rupert told his story, and how sweetly she was moved
by the pathos of it. Once or twice she made an involuntary movement
forward, as if she was drawn towards him, and uttered a lovely low
exclamation which was a little like the broken coo of a dove. Rupert did
not know that there was pathos in his relation. He made only a simple
picture of things, but as he went on Tom saw all the effect of the hot
little town left ruined and apathetic after the struggle of war, the
desolateness of the big house empty but for its three rooms, its bare
floors echoing to the sound of the