When Barbara Strange bade young Harding go and make his fortune, she did not know the curious potency of her advice. The words fell, like a gleam of summer sunshine, across a world of stony antagonisms and smouldering fires. And, with all the bright unconsciousness of sunshine, they transformed it into a place of life and hope. She had called her little cross her talisman, but Harding's talisman--for there are such things--was the folded letter in his pocketbook. As she stood beside him, flushed, eager, radiant, pleading with him, "Could not you care for Mitchelhurst, _if_--" she awakened a sudden craving for action, a sudden desire of possession in his ice-bound heart. To any other woman he could have been only Reynold Harding, a penniless tutor, recognised, perhaps, as a kind of degenerate offshoot of the Rothwell tree. But to Barbara he was the one remaining hope of the old family of which she had thought so much; he was the king who was to enjoy his own again, and her shining glances bade him go and conquer his kingdom without delay. And in Mitchelhurst Church, as he stood among his dead people, with the rain beating heavily on-- "The lichen-crusted leads above," he had made up his mind. He would cast in his lot with the Hardings till he should have earned the right to come back to the Rothwells' inheritance. He would do it, but not for the Rothwells' sake--for a sweeter sake--breathing and moving beside him in that place of tombs. He looked up at the marble countenance of his wigged ancestor, considering it thoughtfully, yet not asking himself if that dignified personage would have approved of his resolution. Reynold, as he stared at the aquiline features, wondered idly whether the lean-faced gentleman had ever known and loved a Barbara Strange, and whether he had kissed her with those thin, curved lips of his. Of course they were not as grimy and pale in real life as in their sculptured likeness. And yet it was difficult to picture him alive, with blood in his veins, stooping to anything as warm and sweet as Barbara's damask-rose mouth. It seemed to Reynold that only he and Barbara, in all the world, were truly alive, and he only since he had known her.