gress of his own
journey. But at the hotel he had stuck fast,--and now, on the tenth of
September, was no nearer the moors and the deer-forest than he had been
a month before.

A novel sense of loneliness,--of the fatuity of present
existence,--weighed grievously upon him. The ladies of Grafton Street
had left town upon a comprehensive itinerary of visits which included
the Malvern country, and a ducal castle in Shropshire, and a place in
Westmoreland. There was nothing very definite about the date of their
coming to him in Scotland. The lady who had consented to marry him had,
somehow, omitted to promise that she would write to him. An arrangement
existed, instead, by which she and his niece Julia were to correspond,
and to fix between themselves the details of the visit to Morayshire.

Thorpe hardly went to the point of annoyance with this arrangement.
He was conscious of no deep impulse to write love-letters himself, and
there was nothing in the situation which made his failure to receive
love-letters seem unnatural. The absence of moonshine, at least during
this preliminary season, had been quite taken for granted between them,
and he did not complain even to himself. There was even a kind of
proud satisfaction for him in the thought that, though he had all but
completed the purchase of the noble Pellesley estate for Edith Cressage,
he had never yet kissed her. The reserve he imposed upon himself gave
him a certain aristocratic fineness in his own eyes. It was the means by
which he could feel himself to be most nearly her equal. But he remained
very lonely in London, none the less.

It is true that a great deal of society was continually offered to him,
and even thrust upon him. In the popular phrase, London was empty,
but there seemed to be more people than ever who desired Mr. Stormont
Thorpe' s presence at their dinner-tables, or their little theatre or
card or river parties. He clung sullenly to his rule of going
nowhere, but it was not so simple a matter to evade the civilities and
importunities of those who were stopping at the hotel, or who came there
to waylay him at the entrance, or to encounter him in the restaurant. He
could not always refuse to sit down at tables when attractively-dressed
and vivacious women made room for him, or to linger over cigars and wine
with their husbands and escorts later on.

An incessant and spirited court was paid to him by many different groups
of interested people who w