Then there was a pause--Laxton had felt the kindness, the confidence of her manner. Suddenly bending down, he saw that the tears were in her eyes--that her lips were trembling. Could it be--? Oh! God, was it possible that she relented--that his intense feeling had at last roused an answering chord? A flood of deep colour swept over his fair sunburnt face. "Lucy!" he said hoarsely, "Lucy!" She looked up at him with sudden mute appeal, but alas! he misunderstood the meaning of the look. "If it is ever any good--any good now, my asking you again, you will let me know--you will be kind?" Poor, inadequate words, so he felt them to be, but enough, more than enough, if he had interpreted aright the look he had surprised. But Lucy shook her head, "It is no good, I only wish it were--though I don't know why you should care so much." They rode on into the village, and Laxton showed the good stuff he was made of by coming, as he had said he would, to the Grange, where Mrs. Kemp, after glancing at Lucy, entertained him with a pitying and heavy heart. CHAPTER IX. "Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world." R. L. S. Love has been described, by one who had a singularly intuitive knowledge of men's hearts, as a vital malady, and in one essential matter the similitude holds good--namely, in the amazing suddenness with which the divine fever will sometimes, nay often, seize upon its victim, driving out for the time being all other and allied ills, leaving room only for the one all-consuming passion. James Berwick was one of those men--more rarely found perhaps in England than on the Continent, and less often now than in the leisurely days of the past--who can tell themselves that they are pastmasters in the art of love. Two things in life were to him of absorbing interest--politics and women, and he found, as have done so many of his fellows, that the two were seldom in material conflict. His sister, Miss Berwick, did not agree in this finding, but she kept her views and her occasional misgivings to herself. Women had always played a great part in James Berwick's life, and that, as is generally true of the typical lover, in a very wide sense, as often as not "en tout bien tout honneur." He thought no hour wasted which was spent in feminine company: he was tender to the pruderies, submissive to the caprices, and very grateful for the affection often lavished on him by good and kindly women, to whom the thought of any closer tie than that of friendship would have been an outrage.