Mr. Lansdell beguiled his homeward way with many bitter reflections of this kind. But, inconsistent and vacillating in his thoughts, as he had been ever inconsistent and vacillating in his actions, he thought of himself at one time as being deeply and devotedly in love with Isabel Gilbert, and at another time as being only the victim of a foolish romantic fancy, which would perish by a death as speedy as its birth. "What an idiot I am for my pains!" he said to himself, presently. "In six weeks' time this poor child's pale face will have no more place in my mind than the snows of last winter have on this earth, or only in far-away nooks and corners of memory, like the Alpine peaks, where the snows linger undisturbed by the hand of change. Poor little girl! how she blushes and falters sometimes when she speaks to me, and how pretty she looks then! If they could get such an Ingénue at the Français, all Paris would be mad about her. We are very much in love with each other, I dare say; but I don't think it's a passion to outlast six weeks' absence on either side, not on her side certainly, dear romantic child! I have only been the hero of a story-book; and all this folly has been nothing more than a page out of a novel set in action. Raymond is very right. I must go away; and she will go back to her three-volume novels, and fall in love with a fair-haired hero, and forget me." He sighed as he thought this. It was infinitely better that he should be forgotten, and speedily; and yet it is hard to have no place in the universe--not even one hidden shrine in a foolish woman's heart. Mr. Lansdell was before the Priory gates by this time. The old woman stifled a yawn as she admitted the master of the domain. He went in past the little blinking light in the narrow Gothic window, and along the winding roadway between cool shrubberies that shed an aromatic perfume on the still night air. Scared fawns flitted ghost-like away into deep recesses amid the Mordred oaks; and in the distance the waterdrops of a cascade, changed by the moonbeams into showers of silver, fell with a little tinkling sound amongst great blocks of moss-grown granite and wet fern. Mordred Priory, seen in the moonlight, was not a place upon which a man would willingly turn his back. Long ago Roland Lansdell had grown tired of its familiar beauties; but to-night the scene seemed transformed. He looked at it with a new interest; he thought of it with a sad tender regret, that stung him like a physical pain.