That she was ‘engaged,’ and yet not permitted to be spoken of as ‘engaged’--that there was some mystery about her--was evident. A suspicion of a hidden story excites every observer. Heathcote wanted to find it out, as all of us would have done. As for himself, he was not incapable of higher sentiments, though Anne had easily set him down as being so: but his experiences had not been confined to one romantic episode, as she, in her youthful ignorance, had supposed. The story was true enough, but with a difference. The Italian princess was not a noble lady compelled to wed in her own rank and relinquish her young Englishman, as Mrs. Mountford had recounted it, but a poor girl of much homelier gentility, whose lot had been fixed long before Heathcote traversed her simple path, and who fulfilled that lot with a few tears but not very much reluctance, much more in the spirit of Keziah than of Anne. Heathcote himself looked back upon the little incident with a smile. He would have gone to the ends of the earth to serve her had she wanted his help, but he did not regret that Antonia had not been his wife all these years. Perhaps he would have required a moment’s reflection to think what anyone could mean who referred to this story. But even the fact that such an episode was of no special importance in his life would have been against him with Anne in the present state of her thoughts. She would not have allowed it as possible or right that a man should have gone beyond the simplicity of such an incident. In her experience love was as yet the first great fact, the one enlightener, awakener of existence. It had changed her own life from the foundation, nay, had given her an individual, separate life, as she fondly thought, such as, without this enchantment, no one could have. But Heathcote had lived a great deal longer, had seen a great deal more. He had been ‘knocked about,’ as people say. He had seen the futility of a great many things upon which simple people set their hopes; he had come to be not very solicitous about much which seems deeply important to youth. Thirty-five had worked upon him its usual influence. But of all this Anne knew nothing, and she put him aside as a problem not worth solution, as a being whose deficiencies were deficiencies of nature. She was more interesting to him. She was the only one of the house who was not evident on the surface. And his interest was stimulated by natural curiosity. He wanted to know what the story was which the child-sister referred to so frankly, which the mother wanted to ignore. There was even a something in the intercourse between Anne and her father which caught his attention. They were on perfectly good terms--but what was it? He was a man who took things as they came, who did not feel a very profound interest in anything--save one thing. But this little mystery reflected in Anne’s serious eyes, and pervading the house with a sense