Lord Caterham saw all this, and understood her popularity; but he saw too that with it all Annie Maurice was any thing but happy. Reiteration of conventionality,--the reception of the callers and the paying of the calls, the morning concerts and afternoon botanical promenades, the occasional Opera-goings, and the set dinner-parties at home,--these weighed heavily on her. She felt that her life was artificial, that she had nothing in common with the people with whom it was passed, save when she escaped to Lord Caterham's room. He was at least natural; she need talk or act no conventionality with him; might read, or work, or chat with him as she liked. But she wanted some purpose in life--that Caterham saw, and saw almost with horror; for that purpose might tend to take her away; and if she left him, he felt as though the only bright portion of his life would leave him too. Yes; he had begun to acknowledge this to himself. He had fought against the idea, tried to laugh it off, but it had always recurred to him. For the first time in his life, he had moments of happy expectancy of an interview that was to come, hours of happy reflection over an interview that was past. Of course the Carry-Chesterton times came up in his mind; but these were very different. Then he was in a wild state of excitement and tremor, of flushed cheeks and beating heart and trembling lips; he thrilled at the sound of her voice; his blood, usually so calm, coursed through his veins at the touch of her hand; his passion was a delirium as alarming as it was intoxicating. The love of to-day had nothing in common with that bygone time. There was no similarity between Carry Chesterton's dash and _aplomb_ and Annie Maurice's quiet domestic ways. The one scorched him with a glance; the other soothed him with a word. How sweet it was to lie back in his chair with half-shut eyes, as in a dream, and watch her moving quietly about, setting every thing in order, putting fresh flowers in his vases, dusting his writing-table, laughingly upbraiding the absent Algy Barford, and taxing him with the delinquency of a half-smoked cigar on the mantelpiece, and a pile of cigar-ash on the carpet. Then he would bid her finish her house-work, and she would wheel his chair to the table and read the newspapers to him, and listen to his quaint, shrewd, generally sarcastic comments on all she read. And he would sit, listening to the music of her voice, looking at the quiet charms of her simply-banded glossy dark-brown hair, at the play of feature illustrating every thing she read. It was a brother's love he told himself at first, and fully believed it; a brother's love for a favourite sister. He thought so until he pictured to himself her departure to some friend's or other, until he imagined the house without her, himself without her, and--and she with some one else. And then Lord Caterham confessed to himself that he loved Annie Maurice