could not help shooting at Delavoye. And my explanation was no comfort to Guy Berridge; he had thought of it before; but then he had never felt better than the last few days in the country, yet never had he been in such despair. "I can't go through with it," he groaned in abject unreserve. "It's making my life a hell--a living lie. I don't know how to bear it--from one meeting to the next--I dread them so! Yet I've always a sort of hope that next time everything will suddenly become as it was before Christmas. Talk of forlorn hopes! Each time's worse than the last. I've come straight from her now. I don't know what you must think of me! It's not ten minutes since we said good-night." The big moustache trembled. "I felt a Judas," he whispered--"an absolute Judas!" "I believe it's all nerves," said Delavoye, but with so little conviction that I loudly echoed the belief. "But I don't go in for nerves," protested Berridge; "none of us do, in our family. We don't believe in them. We think they're a modern excuse for anything you like to do or say; that's what we think about nerves. I'm not going to start them just to make myself out better than I am. It's my heart that's rotten, not my nerves." "I admire your attitude," said Delavoye, "but I don't agree with you. It'll all come back to you in the end--everything you think you've lost--and then you'll feel as though you'd awakened from a bad dream." "But sometimes I do wake up, as it is!" cried Berridge, catching at the idea. "Nearly every morning, when I'm dressing, things look different. I feel my old self again--the luckiest fellow alive--engaged to the sweetest girl! She's always that, you know; don't imagine for one moment that I ever think less of Edith; she always was and would be a million times too good for me. If only she'd see it for herself, and chuck me up of her own accord! I've even tried to tell her what I feel; but she won't meet me half-way; the real truth never seems to enter her head. How to tell her outright I don't know. It would have been easy enough last year, when her people wouldn't let us be properly engaged. But they gave in at Christmas when I had my rise in screw; and now she's got her ring, and given me this one--how on earth can I go and give it her back?" "May I see?" asked Delavoye, holding out his hand; and I for one was grateful to him for the diversion of the few seconds we spent inspecting an old enamelled ring with a white peacock on a crimson ground. Berridge asked us if we thought it a very peculiar ring, as they all did at Berylstow, and he babbled on about the circumstances of its purchase by his dear, sweet, open-handed Edith. It did him good to talk. A tinge of health returned to his cadaverous cheeks, and for a time his moustache looked less out of keeping and 

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