That night Usk paced his rooms until dawn. New impressions and sensations had so thronged upon him in the hour spent at the Hotel Bloomsbury that to be still was impossible, far more so to sleep. Now that he was removed from the witchery of her presence, it was borne in upon him what a pitiful figure he must have cut in her eyes. What could he do to convince her that he was not such a fool as he had appeared? To remain under such a stigma, to feel that he had deserved, not merely incurred, her contempt, was unbearable. An inspiration came to him, and day found him rummaging among the relics of his Eastern journey. Maps, photographs, scraps of his journals, geological specimens--everything that bore even remotely on the subject in which Mr Steinherz was interested--all these were looked out with the object of turning them to account. Usk was gazing at a most promising heap, when another inspiration came to him. He had made himself look a fool, there was no getting over the fact, and had deserved the raillery Miss Steinherz had poured upon him, but he would turn this defeat into a victory. These relics of travel, judiciously produced one by one, should procure him admission to the Hotel Bloomsbury not for one brief visit, but on many successive days. Perhaps he might succeed in rehabilitating himself in Miss Steinherz’s eyes by his eagerness to help her father, perhaps not; at any rate he would see her. There was no shooting for Usk that August, and the man whose party he was to have joined on the moors found himself thrown over. September came, but the Marquis of Caerleon tramped the Llandiarmid stubble-fields alone, for Usk was still, as his father remarked ruefully, glued to London. Miss Steinherz was more beautiful and adorable and generally goddess-like than ever. Her turns of speech were nothing less than exquisite; even the way that she said “Pap-pa” and “Eu-rope” had a subtle charm of its own, and the little affectation of the accent on the first syllable raised her somewhat colourless Christian name into something unutterably sweet and strange. Her tongue was as ready as ever, but Usk had begun to fancy that she was not quite so inexorable in making fun of him as she had been. She had actually allowed him once or twice to finish a sentence without instantly turning it into ridicule, and on this slight foundation Usk was joyfully ready to erect a hopeful superstructure. He knew her outward appearance so well--the perfect figure, the small head poised on the slender neck, the delicate nose, the little mouth, the masses of dark hair which curled in rings on the white forehead and were piled above it in the most marvellous waves and twists; could it be possible that he was beginning to know Félicia herself--the mind, heart, soul, which must naturally be equally faultless? Those wonderful eyes, so large and dark and clear,--not the eyes of a girl, looking out wistfully on life half in hope and half in fear, but of a