though it seemed for the
moment as if all brightness and energy had gone out of him. Her hands
trembled very much as they resumed their delicate task among the
flowers, and her sweet mouth quivered too, though she tried to speak
bravely and brightly as before.

'Do tell me, Walter, what you are thinking of doing now that your
business has become so prosperous. Don't you think you have lived quite
long enough in that dingy Colquhoun Street?'

'Perhaps so. I had thoughts of leaving it, but it is a great thing for a
man to be on the premises. Your uncle would not have approved of my
leaving the place so soon. Colquhoun Street was good enough for him all
his days,' said Walter, striving to speak naturally, and only partially
succeeding.

'Ah, yes, poor man; but just think how much he denied himself to give me
all this,' she said, with a glance round the beautiful room. 'How much
happier he and I would have been with something a little lower than
this, and a little higher than Colquhoun Street. It often makes me sad
to think of the poverty of his life and the luxury of mine.'

'But you were made for luxurious living,' was Walter's quick reply. 'You
never looked at home in the old place. This suits you down to the
ground.'

'Do you think so?' Gladys gave a little melancholy smile. 'Yet so
contradictory are we, that sometimes I am not at all happy nor contented
here, Walter.'

'You ought to be very happy,' he replied a trifle sharply. 'You have
everything a woman needs to make her happy.'

'Perhaps so, and yet'--

She paused, and hummed a little scrap of song which Walter did not
catch.

'I am becoming quite an accomplished violinist, Walter,' she said
presently. 'I have two lessons every week; once Herr Doeller comes down,
and once I go up. Would you like to hear me play, or shall we talk?'

'I don't know. It would really be better for me to go away. I can walk
to the station; the walk will do me good.'

'I will not allow you to walk nor go away, Walter, even if you are as
cross as two sticks; and I must say I feel rather cross myself.'

They were playing with edged tools, and Gladys was keenly conscious of
it. Her pulses were throbbing, her heart beating as it had never beat in
the presence of the man to whom she had plighted her troth that very
day. A very little more, and she must have given way to hysterical
sobbing, she felt so overwrought; and yet all the while she kept on her
lips that gay little smile,