quirements.

As he walked along the embankment he reviewed the situation and
conditions recently placed before him. At first sight they appeared
almost amusing and absurd. The whole thing presented itself to the mind
in the light of some huge joke; and yet, behind the joke, lay a curious
sense of inexorableness. At first he did not in the least realize what
caused this sense, he was merely oddly aware of its existence. He walked
with his eyes on the river, watching a couple of slowly moving barges.

It was a still, sunny day. The trees on the embankment were in full leaf.
Scarlet and yellow tulips bedecked the window-boxes in the houses on his
right. An occasional group of somewhat grubby children, generally
accompanied by an elder sister and a baby in a perambulator, now and
again occupied a seat. A threadbare and melancholy-looking man flung
pieces of bread to a horde of sea-gulls. Antony watched them screaming
and whirling as they snatched at the food. They brought the _Fort
Salisbury_ to his mind. And then, in a sudden flash of illumination, he
saw precisely wherein that sense of inexorableness lay. With the
realization his heart stood still; and, with it, for the same brief
second, his feet. The next instant he had quickened his steps, fighting
out the new idea which had come to him.

It was not till he had reached his rooms, and partaken of a lunch of cold
meat and salad, that he had reduced it to an entirely business-like
statement. Then, in the depths of an armchair, and fortified by a pipe,
he marshalled it in its somewhat crude form before his brain. Briefly, it
reduced itself to the following:--

Should he refuse the conditions attached to the will, he remained in
exactly the same position in which he had found himself some four or five
weeks previously; namely, in the position of owner of a small farm on the
African veldt, which farm brought him in an income of some two hundred a
year. In that position the dream, which had dawned within his heart on
the _Fort Salisbury_, would be impossible of fulfilment. His life and
that of the Duchessa di Donatello must lie miles apart, separated both by
lack of money and the ocean. If, on the other hand, he accepted the
conditions, a year must elapse before he made that dream known to her;
and--and here lay the meaning of that sense of inexorableness he had
experienced--he could give her no explanation of the extraordinary
situation in which he would find himself, a s