"What about second childhood?" laughed the irrepressible Mavis. "Seriously, I didn't. I always felt so old. And it's little Mavis who has done it all." "Really, sweetheart?" "All, dear." She rewarded him with a glance of love and tenderness. He went on: "The past is all over and done with. I made a fresh start from the day you promised to throw in your exquisite self with me." Thus he would talk, expressing, at the same time, boundless confidence in the future, forgetful or ignorant of what has been well said, "That the future is only entering the past by another gate." One evening, when he had made bitter reference to the life that he had led, before he had again met with her, she asked: "What is this dreadful past you're always regretting so keenly?" "You surely don't want to know?" "Haven't I a right to?" "No. Not that it's so very terrible. Far from it, it isn't. There's an awful sameness about it. The pleasure of to day is the boredom of tomorrow. It all spells inherent incapacity to succeed in either good or evil." "Good or evil?" she queried. "It's going to be good now, since I've little Mavis and her glorious hair to live for." One evening, he brought a brick to show her, which was a sample of those he intended manufacturing, should he get the assistance he now daily expected from his father. She looked at it curiously, fondly, as if it might prove the foundation stone of the beloved one's prosperity; a little later, she begged it of him. She took it home, to wrap it carefully in one of her silk handkerchiefs and put it away in her trunk. From time to time, she would take the brick out, to have it about her when she was at her lodgings. She also took an acute interest in bricks that were either built into houses, or heaped upon the roadside. She was proudly convinced there were no bricks that could compare with the one she prized for finish or durability. Perigal was much diverted and, perhaps, touched by her interest in his possible source of success. The clamourings of Mavis' ardent nature had been so long repressed, that the disturbing influences of her passion for Perigal were more than sufficient to loose her pent up instincts. Her lover's kisses proved such a disturbing factor, that, one evening when he had been unusually appreciative of her lips, she had not slept, having lain awake, trembling, till it was time for her to get up. For the future, she deemed it prudent to allow one kiss at meeting, and a further one at parting. Perigal protested against this arrangement, when he would say: "I love to kiss you, little Mavis, because then such a wistful, faraway look comes into your eyes, which is one of the most wonderful things I've seen." Mavis, with an effort, resisted Perigal's entreaties.