Furnished with such a formula, or creed, as the basis of his ethical system, Jerome Wellfield had been left to his own devices. Three times since his father’s second marriage, Jerome had met and stayed with that father. The first time Avice had been a baby, on the other occasions she had been visiting friends unknown to her brother. Jerome and his father had always agreed together perfectly well. Each was conscious that the other had tastes and habits and views of life which to himself would have been most distasteful. Each had had civilisation and _savoir vivre_ enough to ignore that altogether during their brief glimpses of one another. They had never quarrelled—they had never been friends. Mr. Wellfield had enjoyed his life of idle valetudinarianism—his lazy days, his evenings at cards, or in reading-rooms, or lighted gardens. Jerome had enjoyed his life—his pleasant search after the harmonious and the beautiful in life, in art, in nature. He had gradually shut himself up in his own reserve; in his over-refined cultivation and fastidiousness; he had ‘built his soul a lordly pleasure-house, wherein at ease for aye to dwell,’ till now what was ugly and coarse made him shudder, and gave him pain that was almost physical. All this refinement, he often told himself, was not essential to him; he could do without it; poverty would not be anything to dread, for one could have simplicity therewith; the real bane of existence was common, rampant, triumphant philistinism. Wherever he went, he had been well received, and generally flattered: his beauty, his voice, the charm of his manner alone, would have made him the despair of prudent mothers, even as a detrimental; but when to those advantages was added the primary one, that he was an only son, heir to a fine estate, of unimpeachably good and ancient name and lineage, an impartial judge must confess that it was a great thing that Jerome Wellfield had come out of the ordeal, at least outwardly, unscathed, calm, unperturbed, unvulgarised. Open admiration and adulation had revolted his fastidious soul. Till he met Sara Ford, he had never gone further than a mild flirtation with any girl, for he was hard to please. But, having met her, all was changed. Her beauty, her pride, her indifference, calm and smiling, to what other women so eagerly sought after—the fact that she was no easy prize, despite her loneliness and her poverty, had fired him. He had loved with a rapidity and a passion which showed the strange blending of north and south, of Italy and England, that was in him, and that made him what he was. And he, as little as anyone, knew what he was. In him there were two natures; he only knew one, for up to now his mother’s side alone had grown and flourished; he little knew the modifications of southern character which he inherited from that man beside whose bed he sat, waiting for the disclosure which he struggled to utter.