terval Mr. Langhope's privacy was invaded by a stream
of visiting teachers, who were always wanting to consult him about
Cicely's lessons, and lay before him their tiresome complaints and
perplexities. Poor Mr. Langhope found himself in the position of the
mourner who, in the first fervour of bereavement, has undertaken the
construction of an imposing monument without having counted the cost. He
had meant that his devotion to Cicely should be a monument to his
paternal grief; but the foundations were scarcely laid when he found
that the funds of time and patience were almost exhausted.

Pride forbade his consigning Cicely to her step-father, though Mrs.
Amherst would gladly have undertaken her care; Mrs. Ansell's migratory
habits made it impossible for her to do more than intermittently hover
and advise; and a new hope rose before Mr. Langhope when it occurred to
him to appeal to Miss Brent.

The experiment had proved a success, and when Amherst met Justine again
she had been for some months in charge of the little girl, and change
and congenial occupation had restored her to a normal view of life.
There was no trace in her now of the dumb misery which had haunted him
at their parting; she was again the vivid creature who seemed more
charged with life than any one he had ever known. The crisis through
which she had passed showed itself only in a smoothing of the brow and
deepening of the eyes, as though a bloom of experience had veiled
without deadening the first brilliancy of youth.

As he lingered on the image thus evoked, he recalled Mrs. Dressel's
words: "Justine is twenty-seven--she's not likely to marry now."

Oddly enough, he had never thought of her marrying--but now that he
heard the possibility questioned, he felt a disagreeable conviction of
its inevitableness. Mrs. Dressel's view was of course absurd. In spite
of Justine's feminine graces, he had formerly felt in her a kind of
elfin immaturity, as of a flitting Ariel with untouched heart and
senses: it was only of late that she had developed the subtle quality
which calls up thoughts of love. Not marry? Why, the vagrant fire had
just lighted on her--and the fact that she was poor and unattached, with
her own way to make, and no setting of pleasure and elegance to
embellish her--these disadvantages seemed as nothing to Amherst against
the warmth of personality in which she moved. And besides, she would
never be drawn to the kind of man who needed fine clot