el
dreams? No, no! She had not fought to save her own happiness, but she
would fight to the last inch to save Dick's.

Almost as if in answer to her heart's wild outcry the front-door bell
rang, and looking up she saw the short stout figure which of late had
taken to haunting her thoughts on the door-step.

Mr. Jarvis was an elderly man inclined to be fat, with round, heavy
face, very thick about the jaws and unpleasantly small eyes. Yet the
expression of the man's face was not altogether disagreeable and a
certain shrewd humour showed in the lines of his mouth. He had lived for
forty-two years in Wrotham, travelling twice a year to London in
connection with his business, but never venturing further afield. His
house, a magnificent farm building, lay about twelve miles away on the
other side of Wrotham station. It had come down to him through
generations of Jarvises, he was reputed to be marvellously wealthy, and
he had no shyness about admitting the fact. His favourite topics of
conversation were money and horses. He had never married, village gossip
could have given you lurid details as to the why and the wherefore had
you been willing to listen. Mr. Jarvis himself would have put it more
plainly. The only woman he had ever had the least affection for had
neither expected nor desired matrimony; she had been content to live
with him as his housekeeper. This woman had been dead three years when
Jarvis first met Mabel. Quite apart from the fact that of late he had
been feeling that it was time he got married, Jarvis had been attracted
to Mabel from the first. She was such a contrast to the other women he
had known; he admired enormously her slim delicacy, her faintly coloured
face, her grey eyes. He liked her way of talking, too, and the long
silences which held her; her quiet dignity, the way she moved. He placed
her on a pedestal in his thoughts, which was a thing he had never dreamt
of doing for any other woman, and before long his admiration melted into
love. Then being forty-two the disease took rapid and tense possession.
He was only happy when he was with her, able to talk to her now and
again, to watch her always.

Dick's impression was that Mabel hated the man. He disliked him himself,
which perhaps coloured his view, for hate was not quite what Mabel felt.
Had Mr. Jarvis been content to just like her she would have tolerated
and more or less liked him. She had thought him, to begin with, a funny,
in a way rat