ut no relations;
the entire family (happily, Mrs. de Tracy would have said) having died
out with Harold. Robinette was unspeakably lonely, even with her
hundred friends, for there was enough English blood in her to make her
cry out inwardly for kith and kin, for family ties, for all the dear
familiar backgrounds of hearth and home. Had a welcoming hand been
stretched across the sea she would have flown at once to make
acquaintance with the de Tracys, cold and indifferent as they had
always been, but no bidding ever came, and the picture of the Manor
House of Stoke Revel on her dressing-table was the only reminder of
her connection with that ancient and honourable house.

It is not difficult to see, under the circumstances, how the
nineteen-year-old Robinette became the wife of the first man in whom
she inspired a serious passion.

It is incredible that women should confuse the passive process of
being loved with the active process of loving, but it occurs
nevertheless, and Robinette drifted into marriage with the vaguest
possible notions of what it meant; feeling and knowing that she needed
something, and supposing it must be a husband. It was better fortune,
perhaps, than she merited, and equally kind for both parties, that her
husband died before either of them realized the tragic mistake. David
Loring was too absorbed in his own emotions to note the absence of
full response on the part of his wife; Robinette was too much a child
and too inexperienced to be conscious of her own lack of feeling.

It was death, not life, that opened her eyes. When David Loring lay in
his coffin, Robinette's heart was suddenly seized with growing pains.
Her vision widened; words and promises took on a new and larger
meaning, and she became a serious woman for her years, although there
was an ineradicable gaiety of spirit in her that needed only sunshine
to make it the dominant note of her nature.

At the moment, Robinette, in the station fly on her way to Stoke
Revel, was only in the making, although she herself considered her
life as practically finished. The past and the present were moulding
her into something that only the future could determine. Sometimes
April, sometimes July, sometimes witch, sometimes woman; impetuous,
intrepid, romantic, tempestuous, illogical,--these were but the
elements of which the coming years of experience had yet to shape a
character. Young Mrs. Loring had plenty of briars, but she had good
roots and