Sitting at home, brooding over his wrongs, with a short and well-blackened pipe in his mouth, he is giving himself up a victim to despair and rage. That he can still love her with even, it seems to him, a deeper intensity than before, is the bitterest drop in his cup. It was all so sudden, so unexpected. He tortures himself now with the false belief that she was _beginning_ to love him, that she _might_ have loved him had time been given him, and had Egypt held Roger but a few months longer in her foster arms. In a little flash it had all come to him, and now his life is barren, void of interest, and full of ceaseless pain. "Bring withered Autumn leaves, Call everything that grieves, And build a funeral pyre above his head! Heap there all golden promise that deceives, Beauty that wins the heart, and then bereaves, For love is dead. "Not slowly did he die. A meteor from the sky Falls not so swiftly as his spirit fled-- When, with regretful, half-averted eye, He gave one little smile, one little sigh, And so was sped." These verses, and such as these, he reads between his doleful musings. It gives him some wretched comfort to believe Dulce had actually some sparks of love for him before her cousin's return. An erroneous belief, as she had never cared for him in that way at all, and at her best moments had only a calm friendship for him. It is my own opinion that even if Roger had never returned she yet would have found an excuse at some time to break off her engagement with Gower, or, at least, to let him understand that she would wish it broken. To-day is fine, though frosty, and everybody, the children included, are skating on the lake, which is to be found about half a mile from the house at the foot of a "wind-beaten hill." The sun is shining coldly, as though steadily determined to give no heat, and a sullen wind is coming up from the distant shore. "Stern Winter loves a dirge-like sound," and must now, therefore, be happy, as Boreas is asserting himself nobly, both on land and sea. Some of the _jeunesse doree_ of the neighborhood, who have been lunching at the Court, are with the group upon the lake, and are cutting (some of them) the most remarkable figures, in every sense of the word, to their own and everybody else's delight. Dulce, who is dressed in brown velvet and fur, is gliding gracefully hither and thither with her hand fast locked in Roger's. Julia is making rather an exhibition of herself, and Portia, who skates--as she does everything else--to perfection, but who is easily tired, is just now sitting upon the bank with the devoted Dicky by her side. Sir Mark, coming up to these last two, drops lazily down on the grass at Portia's other side. "Why don't you skate, Mark?" asks Portia, turning to him. "Too old," says Gore.