It appeared to Frank that Mr. Brookes had managed to help himself very liberally indeed to all the good things in life; but with his false, facile, Celtic nature, he had no difficulty in re-adjusting his ideas and adopting a view of Mr. Brookes more in harmony with Willy's. He was, as usual, enthusiastic about his friends, and was effervescing with love and goodwill. He saw nothing of their faults--they were the best and truest people he had ever known, and he could not love them too much. Indeed he was angry, and regretted the limitations that nature has set on the human heart, and would if he could have lost himself in one immense and eternal love of the Brookeses. When he bade Willy good-bye at London Bridge, and wished him well with his shop, these sentiments ceased to be active forces in him, and they lay latent in his life of restaurants and bar rooms until the summer returned, and he received an invitation from the Manor House to come down for a garden party at Mrs. Berkins's. When he opened the letter he basked in thoughts of them--of Maggie and her fascinating subtleties, of Sally's blunt speech and sturdy good looks, of Willy, and all the quiet talks they would have together. He counted the tunnels, and, striving to recall the landscape, guessed extravagantly the number of miles that separated him from them. He walked up the drive with a beating heart, looking for the girls between the laurel bushes. He found them, and their habits which endeared them to him, unchanged; and to slip back into the old ways without experiencing the slightest difficulty or jar was like waking from a dream and entering again on a pleasant reality. There was the excellent dinner and the usual complaints about the Southdown Road, the cigars in the billiard-room, conversation about pictures and investments, gin and water, and then a long yarn with Willy in his bedroom. Life moved at the Manor House without any spring creaking, without jolt or jar, and it was this beautiful regularity that made Frank feel so healthily and so unexpectedly happy. He loved the desolation of Ireland. This was the stronger sense, but there was another sense, a half stifled sense, that found an echo in these southern downs interwoven with suburban life--in other words, a faint resurrection of the original English mind in him. He enjoyed and he grew akin to this Saxon prosperity; he learned to recognise it as manifested in the various prospects of the weald and the wold, and he loved this medley of contradictory aspects--the spires of the village churches, the porches of the villas, the rich farmhouses and their elm trees, the orchards jammed between masses of chalk, the shepherds seen against the sky of the Downs. It is true that he felt that this country was alien to him, but he was not individually conscious that his love of suburban Sussex was a morbid affection, opposed to the normal and indissoluble bonds of inherited aspirations and prejudices, and the forms and colours