Ralph walked back slowly to the inn, along the very garden path which half-an-hour before, half a lifetime it seemed to him, he had paced so light-heartedly. The same little stiff box-edging he had noticed before, the same scent from the roses and honeysuckle, the same sun and sky and air. Then, he remembered he had said to himself, it was all sweet and bright and fair. Could he have said so? Was the change in himself only? “Could it indeed be,” he asked, as we all do at these awful times, beating our poor bruised wings against the bars of the inexorable “it is”—“could it be that nature should remain thus unmoved and indifferent when human beings were riven in agony?” And a feeling of intensest disgust, amounting almost to rage, seized him at the sight of the hateful, heartless, beautiful world! But when he found this mood coming over him he checked it violently. “I shall go mad,” he thought, “if I yield to this just now. I must not think of my part of it yet. Time enough for that soon— Time enough, surely, in the desolation of the long years stretching away before me.” And he writhed at the thought. “What can I do?” he asked himself, “what can I do to lighten it to her, or to strengthen her to bear it? Oh, my darling, my darling. I that would have sheltered you from sorrow as never yet woman was sheltered. And to think that of all living beings on this earth, I am the one who must ever to you be less than nothing! But I am maddening myself again.” A sudden idea struck him. “Yes,” he thought. “I should like to see him. One glance at his face would give me a better notion of him than anything I could gather by hearsay. And it will be a sort of satisfaction to know in whose hands my poor child’s future lies.” But on thinking it over he remembered that actually he had heard and asked nothing about this same “him.” In the absorbing personal interest of his interview with Marion he had forgotten all but themselves. Whom she had married, what his station, where they had met—was utterly unknown to him. Nor, indeed, if she had attempted to tell would he have cared to listen. All, in that first bitter, bewildering agony, was to him comprised in the fact that she did in truth belong to another. He walked on slowly through the garden, the hot sun beating on his head, trying as he went to recall the name which he half fancied had been once mentioned by Marion. But in vain. When he got to the house he was seized upon by the landlord and obliged to listen to a long string of apologies for the over-done state of the unfortunate chop. Various emissaries had been despatched, it appeared, to inform him that his “something in the way of lunch” was ready, but had all failed in their mission. “Not expectin’, sir, as you would have strolled beyond the garden, which as being so you must please excuse.”