lieve she and her brother travel about Europe. They never
came back to England. That's what made my cousins feel sure there was
something behind."

"Yes, naturally." Then, with an abrupt return to his usual manner, he
added, "Now, old chap, I'm going to send you packing, and get to work.
Deuced glad to have you back again. Hodson's a slacker of the
slackest. We shan't keep _him_ up here much longer, I fancy. Border
notions of work don't agree with his delicate digestion! See you again
at early parade:--sharp up to time."

And as Richardson's footsteps died into silence, Eldred Lenox went
slowly back to the writing-table.

The past five years had not dealt tenderly with this man of surface
hardness and repressed sensibilities. The black hair at his temples
was too freely powdered with silver, the lines between his brows, and
about his well-formed mouth and jaw, were too deeply indented for a man
of five-and-thirty. The whole rugged face of him was only saved from
harshness by a humorous kindliness in the keen blue eyes, that had
measured distance and faced death with an equal deliberation; and by a
forehead whose breadth made the whole face vivid with intellect and
power. He looked ten years older than the inwardly exultant bridegroom
who had stood upon that sunlit road outside Zermatt, waiting to take
possession of the woman he had won.

The attempt to relieve bitterness of spirit with the stimulant of
incessant work, and the questionable sedative of tobacco strongly
tinctured with opium, was already producing its insidious, inevitable
result--was, in truth, threatening to undermine an iron constitution
while failing conspicuously to achieve the end in view.

After sitting for twenty minutes before a blank sheet of foolscap,
Lenox gave up all further effort at mental concentration. A nostalgia
of vast untenanted spaces was upon him,--of those great glacier regions
where a man could stand alone with God and the universe, could shake
himself free from the fret of personal desire. And he had agreed to
forgo this--the one real rest and refreshment life afforded him,--to
"suffer gladly" the insistent trivialities of hill-station life,
merely, forsooth, because a woman had asked it of him. He
anathematised himself for an inconsistent weak-minded fool. But he had
no intention of breaking his promise to Mrs Desmond.

Since work was out of the question, he pushed his chair back
impatiently, left the table, a