peace which seems the only thing for which you crave."

He waited till the words had quite vanished, and then he took up the two
sheets of paper, folded them in half, and put them in a large envelope
which fitted the paper when so folded. He wrote on the outside, "Mrs.
Pavely, Lawford Chase."

And then, turning out the light with a quick, nervous gesture, he got up
and went over to the long, low, garret window.

For a few moments he saw nothing but darkness, then the familiar scene
unrolled below him and took dim shape in the starlit night.

Instinctively his sombre eyes sought the place where, far away to the
right, was a dark patch of wood. It was there, set amidst a grove of
high trees, that stood Lawford Chase, the noble old house which had been
his mother's early home, and which now contained Laura Pavely, the woman
to whom he had just written two such different letters, and who for
nearly three months had never been out of his waking thoughts.

As his eyes grew more and more accustomed to the luminous darkness, he
saw the group of elms under which this very day a word had unsealed the
depths of his heart, and where he had had the agony of seeing Laura
shrink, shudder, wilt as does a flower in a breath of hot, foetid air,
under his avowal of love.

Violently he put that memory from him, and staring out into the
splendour of this early autumn night, he tried to recapture the mixture
of feelings with which he had regarded Laura Pavely the first time they
had met since her marriage--the first time indeed since she had been a
shy, quiet little girl, and he an eager, highly vitalised youth, five
years older than herself.

Looking back now he realised that what had predominated in his mind on
that hot, languorous June afternoon was astonishment at her utter
unlikeness to her brother, his partner, Gillie Baynton. It was an
astonishment which warred with the beckoning, almost uncanny,
fascination which her gentle, abstracted, aloof manner effortlessly
exercised over him. And yet she had been (he knew it now, he had not
known it then) amazingly forthcoming--for her! As Mrs. Tropenell's son

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