us all the time a heartless sprite who is never fooled; but in the end
all falls away. She beckons, beckons, and all goes....

And so Oleron kept his strategic post within the frame of his bedroom
door, and watched, and waited, and smiled, with his finger on his
lips.... It was his duteous service, his worship, his troth-plighting,
all that he had ever known of Love. And when he found himself, as he now
and then did, hating the dead man Madley, and wishing that he had never
lived, he felt that that, too, was an acceptable service....

But, as he thus prepared himself, as it were, for a Marriage, and moped
and chafed more and more that the Bride made no sign, he made a discovery
that he ought to have made weeks before.

It was through a thought of the dead Madley that he made it. Since that
night when he had thought in his greenness that a little studied neglect
would bring the lovely Beckoner to her knees, and had made use of her own
jealousy to banish her, he had not set eyes on those fifteen discarded
chapters of _Romilly_. He had thrown them back into the window-seat,
forgotten their very existence. But his own jealousy of Madley put him in
mind of hers of her jilted rival of flesh and blood, and he remembered
them.... Fool that he had been! Had he, then, expected his Desire to
manifest herself while there still existed the evidence of his divided
allegiance? What, and she with a passion so fierce and centred that it
had not hesitated at the destruction, twice attempted, of her rival? Fool
that he had been!...

But if _that_ was all the pledge and sacrifice she required she should
have it--ah, yes, and quickly!