playing that she has had
an excellent master. It is not genuine, or from the heart. It is
clever, but it is acquired, and falls very flatly after Molly's perfect
singing, and no one in the room feels this more acutely than Marcia
herself.

Then Luttrell, who has a charming voice, sings for them something
pathetic and reproachful, you may be sure, as it is meant for Molly's
ears; and then the evening is at an end, and they all go to their own
rooms.

What a haven of rest and security is one's own room! How instinctively
in grief or joy one turns to it, to hide from prying eyes one's inmost
thoughts, one's hopes, and despairs!

To-night there are two sad hearts at Herst; Marcia's, perhaps, the
saddest, for it is full of that most maddening, most intolerable of all
pains, jealousy.

For hours she sits by her casement, pondering on the cruelty of her
fate, while the unsympathetic moon pours its white rays upon her.

"Already his love is dead," she murmurs, leaning naked arms upon the
window-sill, and turning her lustrous southern eyes up to the skies
above her. "Already. In two short months. And how have I fallen short?
how have I lost him? By over-loving, perhaps. While she, who does not
value it, has gained my all."

A little groan escapes her, and she lets her dark head sink upon her
outstretched arms. For there is something in Philip's eyes as they rest
on Molly, something undefined, hardly formed, but surely there, that
betrays to Marcia the secret feeling, of which he himself is scarcely
yet aware.

One hardly knows how it is, but Molly, with a glance, a gesture, three
little words pointed by a smile from the liquid eyes, can draw him to
her side. And when a man of his cold, reserved nature truly loves, be
sure it is a passion that will last him his life.

Tedcastle, too, is thoroughly unhappy to-night. His honest, unprying
mind, made sharp by "love's conflict," has seen through Philip's
infatuation, and over his last cigar before turning in (a cigar that
to-night has somehow lost half its soothing properties) makes out with
a sinking of the heart what it all means.

He thinks, too, yet upbraids himself for so thinking, that Miss
Massereene must see that Philip Shadwell, heir to Herst and twenty
thousand pounds a year, is a better catch than Teddy Luttrell, with
only his great love for her, and a paltry six hundred pounds a year.

Is it not selfish of him to seek to keep her from what is so evidently
to