If by accident Sir Ronald saw any of the Leeholme Park people, he simply bowed, raised his hat, and rode on. If he found himself in the same room, he was courteous, calm and cold, as he would have been to any stranger. It was so gradually done that it escaped all notice and observation. But if, on the one hand, all intimacy with Leeholme Park died away, Sir Ronald accepted several invitations to Mrs. Severn’s. He remembered how kind Clarice had been to him, how her eyes had rained down kindness and affection upon him. There was something soothing to the Alden pride in remembering that, if one beautiful woman had rejected him, another was kind and gentle to him--thought more of him than all the world besides. Of that much he was sure. It was pleasant to ride over to Mount Severn in the warm summer sunlight to meet with a welcome from the stately, kindly mistress, to read a warmer welcome still in the passionate, beautiful face that seemed only to brighten in his presence. Yet all the time, while he tried to find comfort in bright smiles and in every pursuit to which he could possibly devote himself, he knew that, day by day, he loved with a deeper and more passionate love. He left Aldenmere for a time and went up to London. On this part of his life Sir Ronald never afterward liked to reflect. He did nothing, perhaps, unbecoming to a gentleman--he did not seek oblivion in low society--but he lived a life of incessant gayety. He went to balls, operas, theatres, _soirées_; he seldom saw home before daylight, and he spent money as though it had been so much dross. Surely, amid this glitter and dazzle, amid this turmoil of pleasure, leaving him no time for thought, he would forget her. Fair faces smiled upon him, siren voices spoke in honeyed accents. Sometimes in the morning dawn, when the sky was full of pearly tints and faint rose-clouds, he would go home and look at his haggard wistful face in the glass. “I am forgetting her,” he would say, exultingly; and then, Heaven be merciful to him! when his tired eyes were closed in slumber, her face, so fresh, so sweet and pure, would be there, looking at him, and he would cry out with a voice full of anguish, that he was haunted and could not escape her. The Aldens never did anything by halves. If they loved, it was with passionate love; if they hated--well, Heaven help us all from being the victims of such hate. There was something pitiful in the way this strong man struggled against his fate, in the way he fought against the passion that had half maddened him. When the unflagging round of gayety had tired him he returned home. He was then but the shadow of the young and handsome lord of Aldenmere. “As well be haunted at home as elsewhere,” he said to himself; “I cannot escape my fate.”