re like capital V--and
how I came to be such an egregious dolt, Lord only knows! Well, I've
paid for it--that I have--I've paid for it. Look here--don't touch!
I'll show you what I found out when it was too late--after she'd played
shy with me till I got angry and left her, and it was all over--my eyes
aren't good enough to see it now, but I suppose it's there still--"

With infinite care and the small blade of his pocket-knife, he lifted
the tiny tip of a tiny Cupid's wing. With bent head and puckered
eyelids, Guthrie peered under, and read: "Yours, M. C.," written on a
space of paper hardly larger than a pin's head.

"In my valentine that night," said Mr Pennycuick, "I'd asked her to
have me. I didn't hide it up in this way; I knew, while I wondered that
she took no notice, that she must have seen it. This was her answer.
And I never got it, sir, till she was married to another man--and then
by the merest accident. Then I couldn't even have the satisfaction of
telling her that I'd got it, and how it was I hadn't got it before. Of
course, I wasn't going to upset her after she was married to another
man. I've had to let her think what she liked of me."

Guthrie was certainly interested now, but not as interested as he would
have been the day before. The day before, this story would have moved
him to pour out the tale of his own untimely and irreparable loss. He
and old Mr Pennycuick would--metaphorically speaking--have mingled
their tears together.

"You forget, off and on," said Mr Pennycuick, as he wrapped up his
treasure with shaking hands and excessive care--"perhaps for years at a
time, while you are at work and full of affairs; but it comes
back--especially when you are old and lonely, and you think how
different your life might have been. You don't know anything about
these things yet. Perhaps, when you are an old man like me, you will."

Guthrie did know--no one better, he believed. But he did not say.
Unknown to himself, he had reached that stage which Mr Pennycuick came
to when he began courting Sally Dimsdale, who had made him such a good
and faithful (and uninteresting) wife.

"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,"
says the old proverb. True enough. But one might write it this way,
with even more truth: "It is better to love and lose than to love and
gain." One means by love, romantic love, of course.

CHAPTER V.

Dinner was over. They had all gone up to the b