71; son of late
Sir William Hewitt Traill, C.B., of Apsley Manor, near High Wycombe,
Bucks. Address: Regent Street. _Clubs:_ National Liberal, and Savage.
_Recreations:_ riding, shooting, fishing."

That was all--the registration of a nonentity, it might have
seemed--in a wilderness of names. But it meant more than that to her.
Each word vibrated in her consciousness. Reading that--slight,
uncommunicative as it was--had made her feel a pride in their
acquaintance. Her imagination was stirred by the name of the house
where his father had lived, where he had probably been brought up.
Apsley Manor; she said it half aloud, and the picture was thrust into
her mind. She could see red gables, old tiled roofs, latticed windows,
overlooking sloping lawns, herbaceous borders with the shadows of
yew trees lying lazily across them. She could smell the scent of
stocks. The colours of sweet-peas and climbing roses filled her eyes.
In that moment, she had fallen into the morass of romance, and through
it all, like a gift of God, permeated the sense that it belonged to
this man who had dropped like a meteor upon the cold, uncoloured world
of her existence.

This is the beginning, the opening of the bud, whose petals wrapped
round the heart of Sally Bishop. Romance is the gate through which
almost every woman enters into the garden of life. Her first glimpse
is the path of flowers that stretches on under the ivied archways,
and there for a moment she stands, drugged with delight.

After supper that evening, Mr. Arthur followed her into the
sitting-room.

"Can you spare me a few minutes?" he asked.

His method of putting the question reminded her of Mr. Bonsfield's
chief clerk--the son of a pawnbroker in Camberwell. He assumed the
same attitude of body. Certainly Mr. Arthur did not fold his hands
together before him--he did not sniff through his nostrils; but her
imagination supplied these deficiencies in the likeness.

She agreed quite willingly. The prospect of what she knew was coming,
held no terrors for her. The only real terror is that of doubt. She
knew the course she was about to take. There was no hesitation in
her mind. The fate of Mr. Arthur in moulding the destiny of Sally's
life was weighed out, apportioned, sealed. It had only to be
delivered into his hands.

If this is a short time for so much to have happened, it can only
be said that Romance is a fairy tale where seven-leagued-boots and
magic carpets are essent