and acquaintances who had seen them together in Rome. Eleanor Burgoyne
was but just thirty, very attractive, and his distant kinswoman. As for
himself, he knew very well that according to the general opinion of the
world, beginning with his aunt, it was his duty to marry and marry soon.
He was in the prime of life; he had a property that cried out for an heir;
and a rambling Georgian house that would be the better for a mistress. He
was tolerably sure that Aunt Pattie had already had glimpses of Eleanor
Burgoyne in that position.

Well--if so, Aunt Pattie was less shrewd than usual. Marriage! The notion
of its fetters and burdens was no less odious to him now than it had been
at twenty. What did he want with a wife--still more, with a son? The
thought of his own life continued in another's filled him with a shock of
repulsion. Where was the sense of infusing into another being the black
drop of discontent that poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps--with the eyes
of his mad sister Alice? Or a son--with the contradictions and weaknesses,
without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging
the future. But that particular way called paternity had never in his most
optimistic moments appealed to Manisty.

And of course Eleanor understood him! He had not been ungrateful. No!--he
knew well enough that he had the power to make a woman's hours pass
pleasantly. Eleanor's winter had been a happy one; her health and spirits
had alike revived. Friendship, as they had known it, was a very rare and
exquisite thing. No doubt when the book was done with, their relations must
change somewhat. He confessed that he might have been imprudent; that he
might have been appropriating the energies and sympathies of a delightful
woman, as a man is hardly justified in doing, unless--. But, after all, a
few weeks more would see the end of it; and friends, dear, close friends,
they must always be.