fore, and to its ills he had applied
the antidote of labour. The burden that sat upon his spirit to-day was
not mere loneliness; to the truth of this his soul attested, but Hilary
Vane had never listened to the promptings of his soul. He would have been
shocked if you had told him this. Did he not confess, with his eyes shut,
his sins every Sunday? Did he not publicly acknowledge his soul?

Austen Vane had once remarked that, if some keen American lawyer would
really put his mind to the evasion of the Ten Commandments, the High
Heavens themselves might be cheated. This saying would have shocked the
Honourable Hilary inexpressibly. He had never been employed by a
syndicate to draw up papers to avoid these mandates; he revered them, as
he revered the Law, which he spelled with a capital. He spelled the word
Soul with a capital likewise, and certainly no higher recognition could
be desired than this! Never in the Honourable Hilary's long, laborious,
and preeminently model existence had he realized that happiness is
harmony. It would not be true to assert that, on this wonderful June day,
a glimmering of this truth dawned upon him. Such a statement would be
open to the charge of exaggeration, and his frame of mind was
pessimistic. But he had got so far as to ask himself the question,--Cui
bono? and repeated it several times on his drive, until a verse of
Scripture came, unbidden, to his lips. "For what hate man of all his
labour, and of the vexation of his heart, wherein he hath laboured under
the sun?" and "there is one event unto all." Austen's saying, that he had
never learned how to enjoy life, he remembered, too. What had Austen
meant by that?

Hitherto Hilary Vane had never failed of self-justification in any event
which had befallen him; and while this consciousness of the rectitude of
his own attitude had not made him happier, there had been a certain grim
pleasure in it. To the fact that he had ruined, by sheer
over-righteousness, the last years of the sunny life of Sarah Austen he
had been oblivious--until to-day. The strange, retrospective mood which
had come over him this afternoon led his thoughts into strange paths, and
he found himself wondering if, after all, it had not been in his power to
make her happier. Her dryad-like face, with its sweet, elusive smile,
seemed to peer at him now wistfully out of the forest, and suddenly a new
and startling thought rose up within him--after six and thirty years.
Perhap