ssible worlds, and fitted him like his own well-cut clothes. It
consisted of privileges without responsibilities.

And now the crash had come, and all was over.

As the gong sounded for luncheon he turned over and lay on his back,
staring at the ceiling.

It should have been a very attractive face under other circumstances.
Beneath his brown curls, just touched with gold, there looked out a
pair of grey eyes, bright a week ago, now dimmed with tears, and
patched beneath with lines of sorrow. His clean-cut, rather passionate
lips were set now, with down-turned corners, in a line of angry
self-control piteous to see; and his clear skin seemed stained and
dull. He had never dreamt of such misery in all his days.

As he lay now, with lax hands at his side, tightening at times in an
agony of remembrance, he was seeing vision after vision, turning now
and again to the contemplation of a dark future without life or love
or hope. Again he saw Amy, as he had first seen her under the luminous
July evening, jeweled overhead with peeping stars, amber to the
westwards, where the sun had gone down in glory. She was in her
sun-bonnet and print dress, stepping towards him across the
fresh-scented meadow grass lately shorn of its flowers and growth,
looking at him with that curious awed admiration that delighted him
with its flattery. Her face was to the west, the reflected glory lay
on it as delicate as the light on a flower, and her blue eyes regarded
him beneath a halo of golden hair.

He saw her again as she had been one moonlight evening as the two
stood together by the sluice of the stream, among the stillness of the
woods below the village, with all fairyland about them and in their
hearts. She had thrown a wrap about her head and stolen down there by
devious ways, according to the appointment, meeting him, as was
arranged, as he came out from dinner with all the glamour of the Great
House about him, in his evening dress, buckled shoes, and
knee-breeches all complete. How marvelous she had been then--a sweet
nymph of flesh and blood, glorified by the moon to an ethereal
delicacy, with the living pallor of sun-kissed skin, her eyes looking
at him like stars beneath her shawl. They had said very little; they
had stood there at the sluice gate, with his arm about her, and
herself willingly nestling against him, trembling now and again;
looking out at the sheeny surface of the slow flowing stream from
which, in the imperceptibl