spring, the scent of violets. To be more longed for by a man than the daylight by a watcher; this desire it was that she felt, not passion, still less love. Both of these are rarer than we think. At any rate, she had felt neither, though she had been for three months Dr. Borlace's wife.

So long had she been considered the strange changeling in her mother's family, that when her first offer of marriage came she accepted it, with a sense of joyful experiment as her most lively sensation. But by now the experiment was neither joyful nor lively.

"Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,

Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."

The voice rang out again in her fancy; it was not in this way that Dr. Borlace had talked, and yet it was this tone that a woman's heart would go on missing till the very end. This, too, she might have conquered, but for Eve's inheritance. Since the days of Eden, when the woman first had the boldness to experiment with the tree of life, it has always been the woman who loves experiment in emotion, and of danger knows only the thrill, not the fear. Woman's usual disinclination to risk decisive action deserts her entirely in her love affairs; a woman to whom consols appear a hazardous investment will cheerfully risk marriage with a selfish spendthrift or an icy egotist. Inherited instinct, doubtless, else had the race ceased long ago; burnt over and over again at the fire of life, woman still plays with it as she did in the days of the cave-dweller.

So still sat Wilmot that a puffin took her for a rock, and with the cry he uttered on discovering his mistake startled her into going home. At the moment that puffin was more nerve-shaking than Archelaus, for it is chiefly the external that is startling to a woman. The depths within she faces calmly enough, for, indeed, they make up the sphere of her normal activity.

CHAPTER III

HUNGER TOWER

"A HUSBAND'S nothing more than a dear luxury," said Mrs. Quick, firmly. "I've always said so, and I always shall. Mine had a broad back, that came handy to warm my hands against of a cold winter's night, but even for that a hot-water bottle's cheaper, especially if you have to keep the kitchen fire alight constantly."

Wilmot and her mother were calling at St. Piran's, hence these remarks, which were addressed to Mrs. Rouncevell as calculated to be consoling to her in her widowed state, for although Mrs. Rouncevell had been long a widow, Mrs. Quick still considered her in need of comfort. For, indeed, Mrs. Quick possessed no mental background, and past and present became merged in one in her mind. The past was sometimes forgotten, but when remembered stood side by side with to-day. A merry face, framed in ripples of very white hair, was the smallest of her charms; the lavenderscented embrace of her was the greatest. Let her but clasp you once in a bear-like hug and you would forgive her all the boredom you had endured at her hands, for the faintly suggested purity of person and dress was redolent of summer winds across a lavender hedge. The people whom, for reasons of propriety, she hugged not knew little of her charm, save, perhaps, her inspired cookery. She could make egg à la coque divine by the way in which she stirred in the pepper and salt-or so it seemed if you sat as a tiny child on her knee to eat that egg. On a sunny lawn, with

children tumbling at her feet, Mrs. Quick showed the bliss

of a mother hen.

"And yet," said Mrs. Rouncevell, "you have married all your three girls."

“Oh,” said Wilmot, "mother may lay down the law, but she's the last to follow it herself."

"Wilmot's getting married was none of my doing, Mrs. Rouncevell; and it's my belief, too, that my brother Richard never superintended her engagement as I should have done. Not as I did when Venny and Benny were being courted."

Venny and Benny, otherwise Advena and Bien-Venue, Mrs. Quick's eldest daughters, had received their cheerful names when the late Mr. Quick was rejoicing at the appearance of his olive-branches. On the arrival of a third daughter he gave up welcoming names in disgust, and fell back on Wilmot, a Quick name for generations.

"Why, when Venny and Benny both had young men," continued Mrs. Quick, "I kept my head through it all, and, thanks to having two sitting-rooms, we came nicely out of it, and with the blackberry juice running out of the jelly bag in the kitchen at the critical moment, too. For I kept Venny and her young man in the little room just inside the front door, and I had Benny and hers shut up in the dining-room, and I just ran to and fro with my knitting, so that the young men never thought anything of it. And both marriages turned out beyond everything."

"And the jelly?" inquired Mrs. Rouncevell, politely. "Came out perfect, clear and firm, you could cut it with a knife, and all the blackberry flavour it ought to have. And I've nothing to say against either of the young men, though Venny's husband does spoil their boy. He ate a pot of my best raspberry the last time they were in the house, and neither of them said a word. And Benny's had twins

twice, which must be wearing to the constitution, though, of course, you can't go against what's laid down above."

"But I'm sure you're as pleased as can be," said Mrs. Rouncevell," with Dr. Borlace, for all you didn't arrange the marriage yourself. I never saw a man I liked better than the doctor."

"Well," said Mrs. Quick, doubtfully, "I've never been sure how it was going to turn out after I saw how the skin crumpled at the back of his neck, for Wilmot's so pernickety about things like that; so unlike Venny and Benny, who never cared to notice trifles of that sort in the right kind of man."

Mrs. Rouncevell watched Wilmot, who sat in the light of the peat fire which glowed on the oak panelling of the splendid old living-room at St. Piran's. Her dress of dull black, with an open slit at the neck, through which shone the ivory skin, the flaming cheeks that the fire had caught: Mrs. Rouncevell missed nothing of it.

She was so absorbed, indeed, that, forgetting the low wooden bar across the doorway-though she had been accustomed to it for half a century-she dragged her foot against it and almost fell as she went out of the room to summon Tryphena with the tea. This lapse of mind was characteristic of Mrs. Rouncevell, who had even, in her perturbation at the arrival of visitors, buttoned her bodice wrongly all the way up. The tea-tray having been brought in, Tryphena banged the door behind her loudly and betook herself to the garden.

"I'd dearly like to know what they're saying," said Tryphena to herself, "so I'm safer weeding."

Accordingly she weeded.

Mrs. Rouncevell, who dreaded even the amount of irrevocableness implied in committing an ordinary letter to the post, was going to risk an appeal for help to another

woman, to throw the dice, once and for all, for the safety of Archelaus. With dry lips, whose trembling she tried in vain to control, she sank down by the tea-table, her flat-chested body quivering with restlessness, her grey face glistening with the dampness of fear.

"Archelaus is away to-day at Bottreaux. If only he'd been a girl," she said. "A girl would have been so much easier to manage. I envy you, Mrs. Quick, having only girls."

The three women glanced at the far corner of the stonetiled room, towards the part called Archelaus's corner, where his desk and easel stood.

"You escape the trouble of looking round for husbands, and men so scarce, too," said Mrs. Quick. "I can't tell what becomes of 'em. We'd never any difficulty in finding And me left with three."

men in my young days. Wilmot thought it a

lucky escape for Archelaus that he thus missed being turned into a drab Faint-heart, for, with the scorn of an adventurous nature, she had scant sympathy for futile existences. Mrs. Rouncevell paid no heed.

"I've had nothing but trouble in my boy," she said. “I once heard an old woman say, 'Every new child a woman gets is like a new patent medicine: she always thinks it will do something wonderful for her, and it never does.' And it's true. Before Archelaus was born, I thought it would be heaven to see him crawl at my feet; but when he was there, I couldn't think of anything but his chances of croup. And when he got beyond croup, I thought of scarlet fever. And so it's been all along, I've always been going to be safe and happy with him-next time. And that time has never come."

"I should say you want to take a tonic regularly," said Mrs. Quick; "you're bloodless. I said when I saw you first,' Bloodless,' I said. And I'm seldom wrong. It was