Love! Did it hold his for her? he asked himself again as he walked homewards in the dark. Love! He was quite a young man still, only two and thirty, yet he had deliberately set passion and romance from him years before. Poverty had stood between him and the realisation of a dream till, with the sight of his ideal profoundly happy as some one else's wife, had come distrust and contempt for a feeling that experience showed him did not, could not last. Why, therefore, should it enter into and disturb his life at all? Friendship? ah, that was different! Perhaps the future held a time when he would clasp hands with a life-companion; a woman to be the mistress of his home, the mother of his children. But Belle! poor little, soft Belle Stuart, with her beautiful grey eyes! He seemed to feel the touch of her hand in his, the caress of her hair on his lips; and though he laughed grimly at himself, he could not master the joy that took possession of him at the remembrance. Dear little Belle! Amidst the doubt and surprise which swept over him as he realised his own state of mind, but one thing gave him infinite satisfaction,--he had saved her from the far more lasting trouble of her father's disgrace. Friend, or lover, it had been a good deed to do, and he was glad that he had done it. Nothing could alter that. And while he slept, dreaming still of his clasp on the little cold yet willing hand, an official envelope lay on the table beside him mocking his security. He opened it next morning, to lay it aside with a curse at his own ill luck, though it was only a notification that Major P. H. Marsden would carry on the current duties of the Commissariat office till further orders. He had half a mind to go over to the Brigade office and get himself excused: a word or two about his other work would do it; but his pride rose in arms against any shirking for private reasons. Besides, there might be nothing wrong in Colonel Stuart's accounts, and even if there was, he would be the best man to find it out. Yet he walked up and down the verandah a prey to conflicting desires, bitterly angry with himself for hesitating an instant. Common sense told him that it might be as well for one less biassed than he was by previous knowledge to undertake the scrutiny, that it was scarcely fair for him to go to the task with a foregone conclusion in his mind; but pride suggested that he could not trust himself to decide fairly even now. How could he, when he was bitterly conscious of one overmastering desire to save Belle? Then came the thought that if she was indeed what in his heart he believed her to be, if her steadfastness and straightforwardness were more than a match for his own, then the very idea of his refusing the task would be an offence to her. After that, nothing could have prevented him from placing himself with open eyes in a position from which, in common fairness to himself and others, he ought to have escaped. CHAPTER VIII.