ey had known each other very
well as children, and he had often given her a birthday present, till the
moment when, in her third season, Cynthia had peremptorily put an end to
the custom. Then he had gone abroad, and there had been a wide gap of
years when they had never seen each other at all. And now, it was true,
she did often bore him, intellectually. But at this moment, he was not
bored--quite the contrary. The sunny cottage room, with its flowers and
books and needlework, and a charming woman as its centre, evidently very
glad to see him, and ready to welcome any confidences he might give her,
produced a sudden sharp effect upon him. That hunger for something denied
him--the "It" which he was always holding at bay--sprang upon him, and
shook his self-control.

"We've known each other a long time, haven't we, Cynthia?" he said,
smiling, and holding out her ball of wool.

Cynthia hardly concealed her start of pleasure. She looked up, shaking
her hair from her white brow and temples with a graceful gesture, half
responsive, half melancholy.

"So long!" she said--"it doesn't bear thinking of."

"Not at all. You haven't aged a bit. I want you to help me in something,
Cynthia. You remember how you helped me out of one or two scrapes in the
old days?"

They both laughed. Cynthia remembered very well. That scrape, for
instance, with the seductive little granddaughter of the retired village
school-master--a veritable Ancient of Days, who had been the witness of
an unlucky kiss behind a hedge, and had marched up instanter, in his
wrath, to complain to Lord Buntingford _grand-pere._ Or that much worse
scrape, when a lad of nineteen, with not enough to do in his Oxford
vacation, had imagined himself in love with a married lady of the
neighbourhood, twenty years older than himself, and had had to be packed
off in disgrace to Switzerland with a coach:--an angry grandfather
breathing fire and slaughter. Certainly in those days Philip had been
unusually--remarkably susceptible. Cynthia remembered him as always in or
out of a love-affair, while she to whom he never made love was
alternately champion and mentor. In those days, he had no expectation of
the estates or the title. He was plain Philip Bliss, with an artistic and
literary turn, great personal charm, and a temperament that invited
catastrophes. That was before he went to Paris and Rome for serious work
at painting. Seven years he had been away from England, and she h