ealized that it was sheer waste of
time to go on."

"What was she waiting for?" The question came with a certain weariness
of intonation, as though the speaker were somewhat bored; but Hugh
Palliser was too engrossed to notice.

He stretched his arms wide with a swift and passionate gesture.

"She was waiting for a scamp," he declared.

"It is maddening to think of--the sweetest woman on earth, Conyers,
wasting her spring and her summer over a myth, an illusion. It was an
affair of fifteen years ago. The fellow came to grief and disappointed
her. She told me all about it on the day she promised to marry me. I
believe her heart was nearly broken at the time, but she has got over
it--thank Heaven!--at last. Poor Damaris! My Damaris!"

He ceased to speak, and a dull roar of thunder came out of the night
like the voice of a giant in anguish.

Hugh began to smoke, still busy with his thoughts.

"Yes," he said presently, "I believe she would actually have waited all
her life for the fellow if he had asked it of her. Luckily he didn't go
so far as that. He was utterly unworthy of her. I think she sees it now.
His father was imprisoned for forgery, and no doubt he was in the know,
though it couldn't be brought home to him. He was ruined, of course, and
he disappeared, just dropped out, when the crash came. He had been on
the verge of proposing to her immediately before. And she would have had
him too. She cared."

He sent a cloud of smoke upwards with savage vigour.

"It's damnable to think of her suffering for a worthless brute like
that!" he exclaimed. "She had such faith in him too. Year after year she
was expecting him to go back to her, and she kept me at arm's length,
till at last she came to see that both our lives were being sacrificed
to a miserable dream. Well, it's my innings now, anyway. And we are
going to be superbly happy to make up for it."

Again he flung out his arms with a wide gesture, and again out of the
night there came a long roll of thunder that was like the menace of a
tortured thing. A flicker of lightning gleamed through the open door for
a moment, and Conyers' dark face was made visible. He had ceased to
smoke, and was staring with fixed, inscrutable eyes into the darkness.
He did not flinch from the lightning; it was as if he did not see it.

"What would she do, I wonder, if the prodigal returned," he said
quietly. "Would she be glad--or sorry?"

"He never will," returned Hugh quickly