‘He either fears his fate too much, Or his deserts are small, Who dares not put it to the touch, To win or lose it all.’ He had tried his fate—hopefully, confidently even—lured on by her deceptive sweetness; and all was lost. She had run lightly off. She was on the other side of the lawn before he stirred from the attitude in which she left him; his hands clenched, his head bent, his eyes staring stupidly at the gravel walk. ‘She does not care a straw for me,’ he said to himself, ‘not a straw. And I thought she had grown fond of me. I thought I had but to speak.’ A friendly hand touched him lightly on the shoulder. It was Gerald, the man for whom Fate had reserved all good things—unbounded talents, unbounded wealth, the love of a perfect woman. ‘Cheer up, old fellow,’ said Gerald heartily. ‘Forgive me if I heard more than you intended me to hear. Mrs. Turchill sent me in quest of you and Daphne, and I came up—just as you—’ ‘Just as I made an ass of myself,’ interrupted Edgar. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t a bit mind your knowing. I have no pride of that kind. I am proud of loving her, even in vain.’ ‘Don’t be down-hearted, man. A girl of that kind must be played as an expert angler plays a frisky young salmon. She has refused you to-night; she may accept you three months hence.’ ‘She laughed at me,’ said Edgar, with deepest despondency. ‘It is her disposition to laugh at all things. You must have patience, man; patience and persistence. “My love is but a lassie yet.” Thy beloved one still delights in the green fields; her tender neck cannot bear the yoke. Wait, and she will turn to thee—as—as the sunflower turns to the sun,’ concluded Gerald, having vainly sought a better comparison. ‘It doesn’t,’ cried Edgar dejectedly. ‘That is what we have just been talking about. The sunflower is a stiff-necked impostor.’ CHAPTER XV. ‘NOT FOR YOUR LINAGE, NE FOR YOUR RICHESSE.’ The two young men walked up and down under the walnut-trees for nearly an hour, Gerald Goring playing the unaccustomed part of consoler. He liked Edgar Turchill with an honest liking. There was a shade of condescension, of unconscious patronage, in the feeling; but it was thoroughly sincere. The Saxon squire was of course distinctly on a lower intellectual level than the man of mixed race—the man whose father had thrust himself into the front ranks of life by the sheer force of will and brains, unaided by conventional training of any kind; whose mother had been the last development of a family reared in courts and palaces. Compared with the quicksilver that flowed in his own veins, Edgar Turchill’s blood was a fluid that smacked of the vegetable kingdom—watery stuff such as oozes out of a turnip or a cabbage when the cook-maid cuts it. Yet the man could feel, and so keenly, that Gerald was touched with tender pity.