pack of beagles--leaving not even a rabbit unscented.

Brunton! Thinking of his "leader," professional instincts blurted in the barrister's brain. The low, dingy, paneled room, the shaft of sunlight on the worn carpet, the green of trees at his window, seemed to vanish from view. He was on horseback again--fox-hunting--with Brunton's wife. 

"March," he thought. "And now it's May. Why can't I forget?"

But he couldn't forget. The woman's face, flawless, almost colorless, the vivid wallflower-brown of her eyes and hair, had haunted him for nearly three months. He was "in love" with her. At least, he supposed he must be "in love."

He had been "in love" before; with a girl in Hampshire (long ago, that--he could scarcely remember her name--Prudence); with the usual undesirable; with his cousin, Lucy Edwards, when he went to the front. Remembering such milk-and-water affairs, it seemed impossible that this new emotion could be love.

Was it perhaps passion! He began, standing there in the sunlight, to consider passion--as dispassionately as Aliette herself might have tried to consider it. (In deliberation of thought, they resembled each other, these two.) Although by no means an ascetic, he hated the abstract idea of passion, finding it rather indecent--like the letters not meant for public eyes which, defying the vigilance of solicitors, occasionally found their way into that stereotyped farce, the divorce court.

And yet this emotion could hardly be other than passion.

The blue eyes under the broad brow grew very serious. Inwardly Ronald Cavendish, despite his outward poise--the result of training--had remained extraordinarily young. "Passion," he thought; "how beastly." And for another man's wife! That made it impossible. That was why the emotion must be fought.

He had been fighting it ever since they parted. But the emotion would not be conquered. At times it became an ache, a sheer physical ache.

At such times--and one of them, he knew, was on him now--Ronnie conceived an amazing distrust of his own self-control; an amazing gladness that they had not met in London: although he had seen her, at a distance, more than once, walking across Hyde Park, a Great Dane dog at her heels. They looked, to his imagination, the tiniest mite forlorn--a little lonely woman (he always thought of her as little) with a big lonely hound. Invariably, 

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