First on opening it a curious indefinite scent struck on his nostrils. He sniffed it up perplexedly; some queer old memories began to stir in him, and he paused a moment to try and classify them, but he could not, so he set himself to examine the contents of the missive. The answer given to his problem was accurate and the accompanying remarks clear, strong, and to the point, written in a woman’s hand and signed with a woman’s name, “Grace Selwyn”. That letter was answered before the breakfast things were cleared away, and certain fresh problems enclosed which were not sent in any other direction. Many letters went and came after that, containing problems and their answers, the answers always full of that strange, vague, delicious scent, which seemed to waft itself through the study and to remain there, caught with the dust motes in the sunbeam. A longing and a yearning for those little notes began to take possession of Henry Waring and to disturb his mind. Old memories of the time when he wore frocks and toddled, began to haunt him, and his work was no longer done by reflex action. He consulted a doctor, but as he only confided half his symptoms to that scientific person, quite suppressing the letters, the doctor felt rather out of it and prescribed quinine, which had no effect whatsoever. One morning the yearning for a letter grew suddenly quite overmastering; and none came. This was the climax. By a sudden impulse which he never succeeded in explaining to himself on any satisfactory grounds, Mr. Waring went to his bedroom, knelt down by his big chest of drawers, and proceeded to pack a little valise with every article he did not want, leaving out all those he did. Then he stepped into a cab and made for the station. Towards the close of the day he presented himself at the door of a queer old red-brick manor house in Kent owned by a Colonel Selwyn and his wife, and asked simply for “Miss Grace Selwyn”. In three months from that day the two came down the path hand in hand and stepped out together on life’s journey, and six months later through the death of a cousin, Waring Park fell to them and made up for the loss of the Fellowship. CHAPTER III. THE very day after Gwen’s flight into history Mr. and Mrs. Waring walked up to the Rectory and got through their talk with the master of it. They might not have been altogether so prompt, being still absorbed body and soul in the skeleton, but that, not only was Gwen suffering tortures from the state of her skin through the combined action of paint, paraffin, and other ungents, but into the bargain she had caught a bad and a quite abnormally noisy cold, which kept her presence _en evidence_ by fits and starts whenever she broke loose from the nursery, and which was a weapon judiciously wielded by Mary to keep her parents well up to the mark.