meeting and forming one long, dark line, took his master in from head
to heel. He had already nodded last night, when his wife had said the
gov'nor would take it hard. Retiring to the back premises, he jerked his
head toward the street and made a motion upward with his hand, by which
Mrs. Markey, an astute woman, understood that she had to go out and shop
because the gov'nor was dining in. When she had gone, Markey sat down
opposite Betty, Gyp's old nurse. The stout woman was still crying in a
quiet way. It gave him the fair hump, for he felt inclined to howl like
a dog himself. After watching her broad, rosy, tearful face in silence
for some minutes, he shook his head, and, with a gulp and a tremor of
her comfortable body, Betty desisted. One paid attention to Markey.

Winton went first into his daughter's bedroom, and gazed at its emptied
silken order, its deserted silver mirror, twisting viciously at his
little moustache. Then, in his sanctum, he sat down before the fire,
without turning up the light. Anyone looking in, would have thought he
was asleep; but the drowsy influence of that deep chair and cosy fire
had drawn him back into the long-ago. What unhappy chance had made him
pass HER house to-day!


Some say there is no such thing as an affinity, no case--of a man, at
least--made bankrupt of passion by a single love. In theory, it may
be so; in fact, there are such men--neck-or-nothing men, quiet and
self-contained, the last to expect that nature will play them such a
trick, the last to desire such surrender of themselves, the last to
know when their fate is on them. Who could have seemed to himself, and,
indeed, to others, less likely than Charles Clare Winton to fall over
head and ears in love when he stepped into the Belvoir Hunt ballroom at
Grantham that December evening, twenty-four years ago? A keen soldier,