d carrying it off with me the way he did--bought the six
cylinder after all, he had.... I'll bet old Peter don't know a cylinder
from a stomach pump."

Clarice was evidently going on with her own line of thought. "It will be
the best thing that ever happened to Eunice if she can only be got to
see it."

"Well, if she don't her mother will see it for her." Lessing's voice
died into a subdued chuckle as Peter passed under it on the dew-damp
lawn, but there was no revelation in it for the junior partner. He had
already found out what was the matter with him and what he meant to do
about it.

III

Whatever the process of becoming engaged to Eunice Goodward lacked of
dramatic interest, it made up to Peter by being such a tremendous
adventure for him to become engaged to anybody.

He had gone through life much as his unfriended youth had strayed
through the city streets, aching for the walled-up splendour--all the
world's chivalries, tendernesses, passions--known to him only by
glimmers and reflections on the plain glass of duty. Now at a word the
glass dissolved and he was free to wander through the rooms crammed with
imperishable poets' wares. He walked there not only as one who has the
price to buy, but himself made one of the splendid things of earth by
this same word which her mere being pronounced to him.

He paid himself for years of denials and repressions by the discovery of
being able to love in such a key. For he meant quite simply to marry
Eunice Goodward if she would have him, and it was no vanity which gave
him hope, but a tribute to her fineness as being able to see herself so
absolutely the one thing his life waited for. He knew himself, modestly,
no prize for her except as he was added to by inestimable passion.
Whatever she saw in him as a man, for her not to recognize the immortal
worth of what he was able to become under her hand, was to subtract
something from her perfections. In her acceptance would lie the Queen's
touch, redeeming him from all commonness.

He made his first venture within a week after their first meeting, in a
call on Miss Goodward and her mother in Trethgarten Square, where he
found their red brick, vine-masked front distinguishable among half a
hundred others by being kept open as late as the middle of June. To
their being marooned thus in a desert of boarded-up doors and shuttered
windows, due, as Eunice had frankly and charmingly let him know, to
their being poor am