occurred to the
great novelist, in his search for the real Audrey, to look deeper than
the "primitive passions," or to suspect that the secret of personality
could lie in so pure a piece of mechanism as the human conscience.

Soon after her confession Audrey left town for the neighbourhood of
Oxford. She may have perceived that London was too vast a stage for her
slender performances; or she may have had some idea of following up a
line slanting gently between the two paths pointed out to her by Langley
Wyndham and Flaxman Reed, who had been the strongest forces in her life.
She had come to herself, but she was not the stuff of which renunciants
are made.

It was about three years later that Mr. Langley Wyndham, looking over
his "Times" one morning, had the joy of reading the announcement of Miss
Audrey Craven's marriage with Algernon Jackson, Esq., of Broughton
Poggs, in the county of Oxfordshire.

It was true. After all, Audrey had married a nonentity: it was the end
of her long quest of the eminent and superlative.

Mr. Jackson was certainly not an eminent person, and he was superlative
only in so far as he passed for "the biggest bore in the county"; but he
had the positive merit of being a gentleman, which in these days of a
talented democracy amounts almost to genius. Since that night when, as a
guileless undergraduate, he had interfered with Audrey's first
introduction to Langley Wyndham, Mr. Jackson's career had been
simplicity itself. He had tried most of the learned professions, and
failed in all he tried. He then took up model goose-farming on a large
scale, and achieved success amidst the jeers of his family and friends.
The echo of that derision was soon lost in the jingle of Algernon's
guineas. Not every one can attain a golden mediocrity; and it was a
great step for a man who had hitherto ranked as a nonentity. On the
strength of it he asked the beautiful Miss Craven to be his wife, and no
one was more surprised than himself when she consented. She was his
first and last love--of a series of loves. For Mr. Jackson had never
read "Laura"; indeed he read but few books, and if you had told him of
Langley Wyndham's masterpiece to-day, he would have forgotten all about
it by to-morrow; he would certainly never have thought of identifying
its heroine with his wife.

Nobody ever understood why Audrey made that marriage. For any one who
had enjoyed the friendship of such men as Langley Wyndham and Flaxman
R