is understood by the yet unmarried lovers--insanely sanguine, of human
necessity--asking the impossible, and no blame to them, because they
are made so; but no matter. That thing which comes afterwards, to the
right-minded and well-intentioned, and which they don't think worth
calling love--that sober, faithful, forbearing friendship, that mutual
need which endures all the time, and is ever more deeply satisfied and
satisfying instead of less--is no bad substitute.

Yet how the world of imagination dominates the world of fact! How much
fairer the unseen than the seen! How much more precious the good we
have not than the good we have! In his private desk in his private
study, Guthrie kept--just as old Mr Pennycuick had kept his valentine
--a faded, spotted, ochre-tinted photograph of poor little Lily in the
saucer bonnet with lace "brides" to it that she was married in; and
when Wellwood was humming with shooting parties and the like, and its
lady doing the honours of the house with all the forethought and
devotion that she could bring to the task, the stout squire
would be sitting in his sanctum under lock and key, gazing at that
sweet girl-face which had the luck to be dead and gone. Lily in the
retrospect was the faultless woman--the ideal wife and love's young
dream in one. "I have had my day," was the thought of his heart, as he
looked across the gulf of strenuous, chequered, disappointing years to
that idyll of the far past which her pictured form brought back to him.
"Whatever is lacking now, I HAVE known the fullness of love and bliss--
that there is such a thing as a perfect union between man and woman,
rare as it may be." It will be remembered that he was married to her,
actually, for a period not exceeding five weeks in all.

And Deborah Pennycuick, who would have made such a magnificent lady of
Wellwood--who was, in fact, asked to take the post before it was