of sincerity which he
himself had always worn, or how far she understood him. He thought that
she shrank from what she had seen of his real self, much or little, and
he was conscious of so many gifts and abilities and attractive personal
qualities that he felt a sense of injury. Yet what would his position
be without her? Suppose David should return and take the estates and
titles, and suppose that she should close her hand upon her fortune and
leave him, where would he be?

He thought of all this as he sat in his room at the Foreign Office
and looked over St. James's Park, his day's work done. He was suddenly
seized by a new-born anxiety, for he had been so long used to the open
purse and the unchecked stream of gold, had taken it so much as a matter
of course, as not to realise the possibility of its being withdrawn.
He was conscious of a kind of meanness and ugly sordidness in the
suggestion; but the stake--his future, his career, his position in the
world--was too high to allow him to be too chivalrous. His sense of the
real facts was perverted. He said to himself that he must be practical.

Moved by the new thought, he seized a time-table and looked up the
trains. He had been ten days in town, receiving every morning a little
note from Hylda telling of what she had done each day; a calm, dutiful
note, written without pretence, and out of a womanly affection with
which she surrounded the man who, it seemed once--such a little while
ago--must be all in all to her. She had no element of pretence in her.
What she could give she gave freely, and it was just what it appeared to
be. He had taken it all as his due, with an underlying belief that, if
he chose to make love to her again, he could blind her to all else in
the world. Hurt vanity and egotism and jealousy had prevented him from
luring her back to that fine atmosphere in which he had hypnotised her
so few years ago. But suddenly, as he watched the swans swimming in the
pond below, a new sense of approaching loss, all that Hylda had meant
in his march and progress, came upon him; and he hastened to return to
Hamley.

Getting out of the train at Heddington, he made up his mind to walk home
by the road that David had taken on his return from Egypt, and he left
word at the station that he would send for his luggage.

His first objective was Soolsby's hut, and, long before he reached it,
darkness had fallen. From a light shining through the crack of the blind
he k