IT took two or three days for Pembroke to recover from his fatigue and excitement. Perhaps he did not hasten his complete recuperation. It was surely pleasanter to come down to a twelve o’clock breakfast, served piping hot by Petrarch, with Olivia to pour his coffee for him, with that morning freshness which is so becoming to a woman, than the loneliness of Malvern, with poor Miles’ sad face and pathetic effort to forget himself and the wreck of his boyish life. Cave had taken the boy to his cabin in the pine woods to stay some days, so that there was nothing to call Pembroke back home. Miles was happier than for a long time. Cave spoke to him with a certain bracing encouragement that Olivia’s pitiful sympathy and his brother’s sharp distress lacked. There was more of the salt of common sense in what Cave said than in Olivia’s unspoken consolation, which much as it charmed the boy, sometimes left him sadder than it found him. She was so sorry for him that she could not always disguise it. So a few days went on, and Pembroke began to find Olivia every hour pleasanter, more winning--until one night in his own room, after Olivia had played to him half the evening and had read to him the other half, he took himself to task. In the first place, he did not want to marry at all then. He had a great many things to do first. Then, there was a serious obstacle in the way, even had all the rest been smoothed out. The Pembroke fortune, such as it was, was on its last legs. With the negroes gone, and the land frightfully reduced in value, there was only a slender competence left--and those two years in Paris had cost a pretty penny. Only during the last few weeks Pembroke had waked up to the true condition of affairs. Miles must be provided for, and upon a scale more suited to Pembroke’s tastes than his resources. Then, there remained for the elder brother, nothing. He had not thought of this when he borrowed money at a high interest so merrily while he was in Paris--but as he was every day awaking to his manlier self, this had come home to him in its true light. He was not a man to ask any woman to share poverty with him. To have brought a woman down, as his wife, from a state of former luxury, would have been a misery too keen. Rather would he have died--for false as well as true pride had great share in him. Therefore, he thought, as he sat in his room smoking, it would be better that he did not get his wings scorched. It was to his credit that he did not allow any supposition that Olivia cared for him to enter into his calculation. “Sweet Olivia,” he thought to himself, “some luckier man will win you. I shall be ten years too late,”--and then he sighed, and presently began to whistle cheerfully. But one thing was sure. He would never marry Elise Koller. Even though his eyes were opened now to the fact that he was virtually a ruined man, there was no longer any chance that the baser part of him would succumb to that temptation.