present it, no matter for what ultimate good.

When she and Arnold turned in at her gate, Ludovic had to
stop. Theodora looked over her shoulder and saw him standing
still on the road. His forlorn figure haunted her thoughts all
night. If Anne had not run over the next day and bolstered up
her convictions, she might have spoiled everything by
prematurely relenting.

Ludovic, meanwhile, stood still on the road, quite oblivious
to the hoots and comments of the vastly amused small boy
contingent, until Theodora and his rival disappeared from his
view under the firs in the hollow of her lane. Then he turned
about and went home, not with his usual leisurely amble, but
with a perturbed stride which proclaimed his inward disquiet.

He felt bewildered. If the world had come suddenly to an end
or if the lazy, meandering Grafton River had turned about and
flowed up hill, Ludovic could not have been more astonished.
For fifteen years he had walked home from meetings with
Theodora; and now this elderly stranger, with all the glamour
of "the States" hanging about him, had coolly walked off with
her under Ludovic's very nose. Worse--most unkindest cut of
all--Theodora had gone with him willingly; nay, she had
evidently enjoyed his company. Ludovic felt the stirring of a
righteous anger in his easy-going soul.

When he reached the end of his lane, he paused at his gate,
and looked at his house, set back from the lane in a crescent
of birches. Even in the moonlight, its weather-worn aspect was