cause those about him scarcely to know it was there, made it out
of the question for him to respond to his country's first call for
men, the architect happened to run across James Pomeroy, a cultivated
millionaire with whom he had once had a slight business relation.
Acting on a kindly impulse which even now Mr. Pomeroy hardly knew
whether to remember with pleasure or regret, the older man had
pressed the younger to spend a week in a country house which he
had taken for the summer near London.

That was now fourteen months ago, but Sherston, standing there,
remembered as if it had happened yesterday, his first sight of
the girl who was to become his wife to-morrow. Helen Pomeroy had
been standing on a brick path bordered with holly hocks, and she
had smiled, a little shyly and gravely, at her father's rather
eccentric-looking guest. But on that war-summer morning she had
appeared to the stranger as does a mirage of spring water to a man
who is dying of thirst in the desert.

Up to that time Sherston had always supposed himself to be attracted
to small women. He was a big, fair man, with loosely hung limbs,
and his wife--poor little baggage--had been a tiny creature, vixenish
at her worst, kittenish at her best. But Helen Pomeroy was tall,
with the noble proportions and tapering limbs of a goddess, and
gradually--not for some time, for all social life was dislocated in
England during that strange summer--Sherston became aware, with a
kind of angry revolt of soul, that he was but one of many worshipers
at the shrine.

Following an irresistible impulse, he early in their acquaintance
told Helen Pomeroy more of himself than he had ever told any other