"Yes," said the dark lady thoughtfully, "a careless childhood, running wild almost. That should be the beginning." "Then we pass through the wonder and diffidence of youth." "To strength and action," said the dark lady. Her dreamy eyes were fixed on the Downs, and her fingers tightened on her knees as she spoke. "Ah, it is a grand thing to live--as a man does--self-reliant and free." "And so at last," said Aubrey Vair, "come to the culmination and crown of life." He paused and glanced hastily at her. Then he dropped his voice almost to a whisper--"And the culmination of life is love." Their eyes met for a moment, but she looked away at once. Aubrey Vair felt a peculiar thrill and a catching in his breath, but his emotions were too complex for analysis. He had a certain sense of surprise, also, at the way his conversation had developed. Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt suddenly dug him in the chest with her ear-trumpet, and someone at tennis bawled, "Love all!" "Did I tell you Jane's girls have had scarlet fever?" asked Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt. "No," said Aubrey Vair. "Yes; and they are peeling now," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt, shutting her lips tightly, and nodding in a slow, significant manner at both of them. There was a pause. All three seemed lost in thought, too deep for words. "Love," began Aubrey Vair presently, in a severely philosophical tone, leaning back in his chair, holding his hands like a praying saint's in front of him, and staring at the toe of his shoe,--"love is, I believe, the one true and real thing in life. It rises above reason, interest, or explanation. Yet I never read of an age when it was so much forgotten as it is now. Never was love expected to run so much in appointed channels, never was it so despised, checked, ordered, and obstructed. Policemen say, 'This way, Eros!' As a result, we relieve our emotional possibilities in the hunt for gold and notoriety. And after all, with the best fortune in these, we only hold up the gilded images of our success, and are weary slaves, with unsatisfied hearts, in the pageant of life." Aubrey Vair sighed, and there was a pause. The girl looked at him out of the mysterious darkness of her eyes. She had read many books, but Aubrey Vair was her first literary man, and she took this kind of thing for genius--as girls have done before. "We are," continued Aubrey Vair, conscious of a favourable impression,--"we are like fireworks, mere dead, inert things until the appointed spark comes; and then--if it is not damp--the dormant soul blazes forth in all its warmth and beauty. That is living. I sometimes think, do you know, that we should be happier if we could die soon after that golden time, like the Ephemerides. There is a decay sets in." "Eigh?" said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt startlingly. "I didn't hear you."