"The third one I sent by hand, and it was returned to me unopened. I can see now that it is only what I might have expected; she did not have a thought apart from her father, and her father never liked me well enough to look on me in the light of a son-in-law. He took her away directly he suspected our liking for one another, and when they got together and away from me he must have persuaded her to give me up. I wrote to him and I wrote to her, but, as you know, with no avail. She was a lovable little thing, spoiled by her weakness of will, poor little Norah!" "Poor little Norah!" she echoed half mockingly, and crumbled some mortar off the broken wall and watched it splash into the water below. She was wondering how it was that she had been more fascinated in half-an-hour by handsome, empty-headed Jack Raleigh than she had been in three long years by this large-hearted musician, with the high forehead and the cavernous eyes, with his passion for metaphysics and Socialism, and his ardent desires to reform society and the world in his own lifetime. Yet she found him interesting sometimes, generally when he was not there and she was thinking about him, and she wondered again why he did not interest her more, and whether she would not have tumbled into a commonplace engagement with him if her parents had been alive and he had been asked to dine at the Court, like any ordinary young man, and she had been forbidden, like any ordinary young woman, to come down to the inn and play with his child. But she had no parents to impose conventionality upon her, and she had gloried in her liberty for twenty-five years, and she was loth to give it up now for the sake of a man who, she felt sure, would bore her in a week with his desperate enthusiasms, and whom she was not even sure that she loved. No, she could not marry him, she felt sure, and she looked up to say so, and met his restless eyes watching her with such a boy's eagerness that she again went off on a side issue. "I am not livable with, that is the truth," she said rather weakly, and crumbled some more mortar off the wall, and wished he would not look at her so gloomily. He was thinking that the courtship was not going as smoothly as he expected it would, and beginning dimly to understand that for the only time in his experience he was humbling himself before a woman who was not going to fall a victim to his persuasions; and the discovery did not make him more eloquent nor less humble, though it tended to make him look at the question still more blindly from his own point of view, and he told himself again, obstinately, that he could not live without her for his wife. "Lady Joan," he said suddenly, "is it me that you dislike, or marriage?"