ideal. But when he had acquired exactly the kind of place he wanted to
find, what those whom he had set seeking for him had assured him with
such flattering and eager earnestness he would very soon discover--what
then? Did he mean to live there alone? He thought yes, for he did not now
feel drawn to marriage.

As a boy--it now seemed æons of years ago--it had been far otherwise. But
Betty Tosswill had been very young, only nineteen, and when he had fallen
on evil days she had thrown him over in obedience to her father's
strongly expressed wish. He had suffered what at the time seemed a
frightful agony, and he had left England full of revolt and bitterness.

But to-day, when the knowledge that he was so soon going to Beechfield
brought with it a great surge of remembrance, he could not honestly tell
himself that he was sorry. Had he gone out to Australia burdened with a
girl-wife, the difficult struggle would have been well-nigh intolerable,
and it was a million to one chance that he would ever have met the man to
whom he owed his present good fortune. What he now longed to do was to
enjoy himself in a simple, straightforward way. Love, with its tremors,
uncertainties, its blisses and torments, was not for him, and in so far
as he might want a pleasant touch of half sentimental, half sexless
comradeship, there was his agreeable friendship with Mrs. Crofton.

Enid Crofton? The thought of how well he had come to know her in the
last three weeks surprised him. When he had first met her in Egypt she
had been the young, very pretty wife of Colonel Crofton, an elderly
"dug-out," odd and saturnine, whose manner to his wife was not always
over-kindly. No one out there had been much surprised when she had
decided to brave the submarine peril and return to England.