It was gall and bitterness to him to recall her standing up to confront him with her clear quiet eyes fixed upon him, searching out his meanness, and of her lover with his hand resting on her shoulder to show that it was he in whom she could place her confidence to protect her against the claims of an unworthy jealousy. And he touched the bottom of the cup when he figured them reading his letter together and accepting his compact because he was not worth while their making trouble about, his sting once drawn; and not at all because they believed in its sincerity. They would know well enough why he had written it, especially in the light of his wife's ignorance of what had happened, which he would not be able to prevent her showing them. That ignorant loud-mannered young man who had to be apologised to, in such a way that he could hardly accept the apology without feeling if not showing contempt! It shook him with passion to think of his degradation before him, and of what was being given to him so beautifully and freely. There was not in his thoughts a vestige of the feeling that he would have to act before the world--of pleasure that the girl towards whom he claimed to have given nothing but protecting affection should have found her happiness in a promising love. It was all black jealousy and resentment on his own behalf, and resentment against her as well as against the man whom she had chosen for herself. And yet by the next morning he had persuaded himself that some of those feelings which he would have to act were really his. Perhaps in some sense they were, for right feelings can be induced where the necessity for them is recognised, and his affection for Mollie had actually included those elements which he had so steadfastly kept in the foreground. Also, his arrogance and self-satisfaction had prevented him in his bitterest moments from recognising all the baseness in himself, and gave him a poor support in thinking that, after all, his letter showed manliness and generosity, and might be accepted so. He had, at any rate, to keep up his front before the world, and by the time he met and talked to the Graftons between their house and the church his good opinion of himself had begun to revive. He was still troubled with fears as to how his overtures would be received. Mollie would have received his letter early that morning, and might have come over with her answer; but she had evidently waited to consult over it with her lover. He had prevented his wife running over to the Cottage, saying that they would meet Mollie either before or after church. And so it had to be left, with tremors and deceptions that, one would have thought, must have disturbed him greatly in the duties he would have to fulfil before his parishioners. Yet he preached a sermon about the approaching festival of the church, which denoted in his view, amongst other things, that the evil passions under which mankind had laboured since the creation of the