He went into the hotel to give his orders, while Lina walked slowly up and down one of the terraced pathways, looking at the wild chaos of glacier and rock before her, looking, yet seeing but little of that chilly grandeur, caring but little for its origin or its history, with sad eyes turned inward, vaguely contemplating a vague sorrow. It was not a grief of yesterday’s date—it was a sorrow made up of doubts and anxieties which had their beginning in Gerald Goring’s letter telling her of his intended trip to Canada. From that hour to this she had perceived a gradual change in him. His letters from the Western world, kind and affectionate as they had been, were altogether different from the letters he had written to her in former years. When he came back the man himself seemed different. He was not less kind, or less attentive, less eager to gratify and to anticipate her wishes. To her, and in all his relations with her, he was faultless: but he was changed. Something had gone out of him—life, spirit, soul, the flame which makes the lamp glorious and beautiful; something was faded and dead in him; leaving the man himself a gentlemanly piece of mechanism, like one of those victims to anatomical experiment from whose living body the brain, or some particular portion of the brain, has been abstracted, and which mechanically performs and repeats the same actions with a hideous soulless monotony. ‘Was it that he loved her less? Was it that he had ceased to love her?’ she had asked herself, recoiling with shuddering heart-sickness from the thought; as if she had found herself suddenly on the verge of some horrible abyss, and seen inevitable ruin and death below. No, she told herself, judging his heart by her own. A love that had grown as theirs had grown, side by side with the gradual growth of mind and body, a love interwoven with every memory and every hope, was not of the kind to change unawares to indifference. She was perfectly free from the taint of vanity; but she knew that she was worthy of her lover’s love. She, who had been her father’s idol, the object of respect and consideration from all about her, was accustomed to the idea of being beloved. She had been told too often of her beauty not to know that she was handsomer than the majority of women. She knew that in mental power she was her lover’s equal: by birth, by fortune, by every attribute and quality, she was fitted to be his wife, to rule over his household, and to be a purifying and elevating influence in his life. His mother had loved her as warmly as it was possible for that languid nature to love anything. Their two lives were interwoven by the tenderest associations of the past as well as by the solemn engagement which bound them in the present. No, it was not possible for Madoline, seeing all things from the standpoint of her own calm and evenly-balanced mind, to imagine infidelity in a lover so long and so closely bound to her. Those sudden