The engagement was not as yet a formally announced one, though he had heard it alluded to, two or three times in other quarters. Frank’s absence was probably connected with arrangements he might be making in preparation for his marriage. In short there were a hundred reasons why they should not care to talk about him. No doubt it was decidedly pleasanter for Ralph that they should not do so. He fancied himself quite prepared for it at any time; but, in point of fact, pricking oneself now and then, in a gingerly manner, by way of testing one’s powers of endurance, is a very different thing from the relentless cut of a doctor’s lancet or the deep, piercing stab of an enemy’s poniard! Still now and then he felt puzzled. Marion herself puzzled him. In some way she was changed from what she had been when he first knew her. She had never seemed robust though perfectly healthy, but now she looked at times strangely fragile. Her spirits were less equable. Her colour went and came in a way he did like to see. She was always sweet and cheerful, never more so than now; but it sometimes seemed to him that it cost her an effort to appear so. Then, again, she would be so unaffectedly bright and merry, so almost childishly gay and light-hearted, that all his misgivings, so far as she was concerned, vanished as if by magic. And then he found himself back again in his old place, “middle-aged and dull and dried-up,” utterly unsuited to this happy young creature, whom yet, in all her moods, he found so inexpressibly winning and attractive. She liked him—he was sure of that—liked and trusted and respected him, he said to himself, with a mental wry face. “I’m not sure but what I would rather she hated me!” he thought more than once. And then one day came the rude awakening. All the ruder because he did not know he had been dreaming; or, rather, how unconsciously he had come to live in his dreams, to care more for them than for aught that passed in world of realities! It was one lovely spring afternoon, early in March, a week or two after Sybil had returned home, and everything in the little world of Altes appeared, for the time being, to be jogging on in its usual course. Sir Ralph had sauntered into Mrs. Archer’s; a not unprecedented occurrence, for her little drawing-room was a pleasant place to spend an hour or two in, these hot afternoons. Spring, to our northern ears, hardly expresses the warmth and brilliancy of some of these exquisite first tastes of the coming summer in the south of France. The loveliest time, indeed, of all the year thereabouts; while the green below, still fresh and radiant, matches in brilliance the blue above. Later on in the season trees and herbage look sun-dried and scorched, and one turns with relief to the thought of our less intense summers at home.