"You forget, off and on," said Mr Pennycuick, as he wrapped up his
treasure with shaking hands and excessive care--"perhaps for
years at a time, while you are at work and full of affairs; but it
comes back--especially when you are old and lonely, and you think how
different your life might have been. You don't know anything about
these things yet. Perhaps, when you are an old man like me, you will."

Guthrie did know--no one better, he believed. But he did not say.
Unknown to himself, he had reached that stage which Mr Pennycuick came
to when he began courting Sally Dimsdale, who had made him such a good
and faithful (and uninteresting) wife.

"It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,"
says the old proverb. True enough. But one might write it this way,
with even more truth: "It is better to love and lose than to love and
gain." One means by love, romantic love, of course.




CHAPTER V.



Dinner was over. They had all gone up to the big drawing-room, which
was the feature of the 'new part'--the third house of the series which
now made one. The new part was incongruously solid and modern, with a
storey (comprising the drawing-room and its staircase only) which
overtopped the adjacent roofs. Below it was a corresponding