at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy memory of such slight importance as Hilda's child friendship; but Katherine's certainty of the slightness--and this man of forty looked anything but sentimental--left her very tolerant of his preoccupation. Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended, rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking. Indeed his next words showed as much. "How many changes--forgive the truism, of course--in ten years! Did you know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find myself an uncle with a vengeance." "I haven't seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages ago, that wedding." "Mary has drawn a lucky number in life," said Odd absently. "She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England, at Allersley?" "Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is rather lonely." "Why don't you fill it with people?" "You forget that I don't like people," said Odd. "You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty as landowner and country gentleman." "Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness." "The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn't care to see us! No, I think I prefer Paris to the Priory." "What do you do with yourself in Paris?" "Very little that amounts to anything," Katherine owned; "one can't very well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn't born with them, one must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good fighter if I had my weapons!" and Katherine's dark eye, as it flashed round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago. He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him. "Yes," he said, "I think you would be a good fighter. What would you fight?" "The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more's the pity." "And the flesh and the devil," Odd suggested; "is this to be a moral crusade?" "I'm afraid I can't claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of conquering; 'to ride in triumph through Persepolis,' like Tamburlaine, chain up people I don't like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the people I liked." "And all the others would be in cages!" "They would deserve it if I put them there! I'm very kind-hearted, very tolerant." "And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all marching and caging." "I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but not meanly so, I assure you."