He took down a slim, ill-printed volume, bearing on the title-page the name of Philip Hammond, and composed of essays which had first appeared in the more serious reviews. Setting down his lamp on Penelope's deal painting-table, he opened the little book with prejudice, read on with increasing attention, and finally placed it back on the shelf with respect. Even so, his lips curled as he remembered the only time he had seen the writer. The two men had met by accident in Mrs. Robinson's London house, and Wantley had been amused by Hammond's obvious--too obvious--devotion to the beautiful widow of the man whose aims and whose ideals he had known how to describe so well in this very book. For the hundredth time Wantley asked himself in what consisted Penelope's power of attracting such men as had been apparently Melancthon Robinson, as was undoubtedly Philip Hammond, as had become--to give the clinching instance--David Winfrith. The day before, when driving back to Monk's Eype from the place where he had been spending a few pleasant days, he had passed the two riders, and had seen them so deeply absorbed in one another's conversation that they had ridden by without seeing him. For a moment, as he had driven by quickly in a dogcart belonging to his late host, and therefore unfamiliar to Penelope and her companion, he had caught a look--an unguarded, unmasked, passionate look--on Winfrith's strong, plain face. What glance, what word on his companion's part, had brought it there? That Winfrith should allow himself to be thus moved angered Wantley. He set himself to recall very deliberately certain things that his mother, acting with strange lack of good feeling, had told him, when he was still a boy, concerning Lady Wantley's mother, Penelope's grandmother. He wondered if Penelope _knew_. On the whole he thought not. But in any case, who could doubt from whom she had had transmitted to her that uncanny power of bewitching men, of keeping them faithful to herself, while she remained, or at least so he felt persuaded, quite unaffected by the passions she delighted in unloosing? In his own mind, and not for the first time, he judged his cousin very hardly. And yet, after that evening, Wantley never thought so really ill of her again, for, when he felt tempted to do so, he seemed to hear the words which he had heard said that day for the first, though by no means for the last, time: 'Why are you--what makes you--so unfair to Penelope?' And even as he walked through the sleeping, silent house he reminded himself, repentantly, that his cousin's love-compelling power extended to what was already to him the best and purest, as it was so soon to be the dearest, thing on earth. CHAPTER IX 'La Passion, c'est l'ascétisme profâne, aussi rude que ascétisme religieux.'--ANATOLE FRANCE. I Within two hours of his curious conversation with his cousin, Wantley saw Mrs. Robinson and Cecily Wake start off, alone, for Shagisham.