it would be good for me. 'Oh, Trenchard,' he said. 'He ought to be in a nunnery ... and he'd be quite safe, too. He'd never cause a scandal!' They thought of me as something not quite human. My father was very old now. Just before he died, he said: 'I'd like to have had a son!' He never noticed me at his bedside when he died. I was a great disappointment to him."

[31]

"Well," I said at last to break a long pause that followed his last words, "what did you think about all that time you were alone?"

"I used to think always about two things," he said very solemnly. "One was love. I used to think how splendid it would be if only there would be some one to whom I could dedicate my devotion. I didn't care if I got much in return or no, but they must be willing to have it ready for me to devote myself altogether. I used to watch the ladies in our town and select them, one after another. Of course they never knew and they would only have laughed had they known. But I felt quite desperate sometimes. I had so much in me to give to some one and the years were all slipping by and it became, every day, more difficult. There was a girl ... something seemed to begin between us. She was the daughter of one of the canons, dark-haired, and she used to wear a lilac-coloured dress. She was very kind; once when we were walking through the town I began to talk to her. I believe she understood, because she was very, very young—only about eighteen—and hadn't begun to laugh at me yet. She had a dimple in one cheek, very charming—but some man from London came to stay at the Castle and she was engaged to him. Then there were Katherine and Millie Trenchard, of whom we were talking. Katherine never laughed at me; she was serious and helped[32] her mother about all the household things and the village where they lived. Afterwards she ran away with a young man and was married in London—very strange because she was so serious. There was a great deal of talk about it at the time. Millie too was charming. She laughed at me, of course, but she laughed at every one. At any rate she was only cousinly to me; she would not have cared for my devotion."

[32]

As he spoke I had a picture in my mind of poor Trenchard searching the countryside for some one to whom he might be devoted, tongue-tied, clumsy, stumbling and stuttering, a village Don Quixote with a stammer and without a Dulcinea.

"They must have been difficult years," I said, and again cursed myself for my banality.

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