men who lead a one-sided life with a two-sided nature, he was seized with a profound disgust, and would have welcomed almost any change. Never had he understood the futility of a normal human being trying to live on ideas alone until he returned to Deerchase. As soon as he had eliminated everything from his life except books and intellectual effort, he began to find books more of an anodyne and work more of a hopeless effort than ever. When he was quite ready for his life work, when he had prepared himself, his house, his tools, in perfection for that work, a deadly paralysis had seized upon him, a frightful fear of failure. Then, following this, he suddenly found an unsuspected source of pleasure--the society of a woman. He could have as much or as little of that society as he wanted, even if he married her, for it is the privilege of the rich to have privacy and independence in every relation of life. It was true he would have to give up much money, which most men are unequal to parting with, to marry her. But he would give it up to Lewis, a creature intensely loved. Still, it would be a curtailment of his power, for money is power. At first the consequences seemed enormous; but they assumed much smaller proportions as he investigated them. He would not be able to buy thousands of books, as he had done, but he suspected, with a kind of shame, that he had too many books already. He would no longer be able to leave orders in blank with the great collectors in London, and Paris, and Rome to buy him rare editions, but he remembered with disgust that these orders had been carried out rather with a view of getting his money than to increasing the value of his collection. He had caught two of his agents in the act of palming off spurious volumes upon him, and had informed them of his discovery and had given them no more orders. As for buying pictures and bric-a-brac, that taste was not then developed in this country. Hundreds of ways of spending money, well known in the latter half of the nineteenth century, were quite unknown in the first half. Skelton found that in giving up his wife’s fortune he was giving up much in the abstract and but little in the concrete. And then came his interview with Lewis.