you closed your doors against me now, you would be sending your most faithful adorer straight to perdition."

"Tut, man!" she rejoined impatiently, "you talk like a gaby. In the name of Heaven, tell me what ails you, or I vow you'll send me into my grave with choler."

"I have been trying to tell you, Mistress, this past half-hour."

[30]"Well?"

[30]

"But Lud help me, I cannot."

"Then it's about a woman," she concluded with firm decision.

He gave no reply. The conclusion was obvious.

The fair Julia frowned. This was threatening to become serious. It was no mere question of moodiness then, of ill-humour anon to be forgiven and dissipated with a smile.

There was a woman at the bottom of my lord Stowmaries' ill-humour. A woman who had the power to obtrude her personality between his mental vision and the daintiest apparition that had ever turned a man's brain dizzy with delight. A woman in fact who might prove to be an obstacle to the realisation of Mistress Julia Peyton's most cherished dreams.

All thoughts of anger, of petulance, of bell-pulls and peremptory congés fled from the beauty's mind. She sat down again opposite the young man; she rested her elbows on her knees, her chin in her hands; she looked serious, sympathetic, interested, anything you like. A sufficiency of moisture rose to her eyes to render them soft and lustrous, appealing and irresistible. Her lips parted and quivered just sufficiently to express deep emotion held courageously in check, whilst from beneath the little lace cap one or two rebellious curls free from powder, golden in colour, and silky in texture, were unaccountably allowed to escape.

Thus equipped for the coming struggle, she repeated her question, not peremptorily this time, but gently and in a voice that trembled slightly with the intensity of sympathy.

"What ails my lord?"

"Nothing short of despair," he replied, whilst his eyes rested with a kind of mournful abnegation on the enchanting picture so tantalisingly near to him.

[31] "Is it quite 

 Prev. P 21/309 next