More meditations, all tending in the same direction—more pacing to and fro, until, raising his eyes, he saw his daughter approaching, accompanied by Jerome Wellfield. Nita’s eyes were bright, and there was a soft flush upon her cheeks. She looked undeniably pretty. Wellfield looked as he always did—handsome with a beauty which is given to few men to wear, stately and high-bred more than most men. ‘They make a goodly couple,’ thought the fond father. ‘She is a winsome lass, and he—yes, by gad, there is something in birth and breeding. He looks the right master for a place like this.’ With which jumble of fatherly pride, commercial astuteness, and prudent calculation, he advanced to meet them. ‘John has gone home to dinner,’ said Nita; ‘he’s coming down in the evening.’ * * * * * Wellfield’s reflections, as he walked towards Brentwood, were far from being agreeable. He had Sara’s letter, with its calm acceptance of the fact that he loved her as she loved him—she spoke of it as if it had been one of the ordinances of nature—unalterable as the laws of the Medes and Persians. She showed him at the same time how very much she loved him, and that stroked his self-complacency the right way; but the other feeling chafed him. Inevitably, from his character, from the inborn, inherited tendencies of his nature, he asked himself, ‘What right had she to accept so unquestioningly his love—to assume that nothing could change it—nothing shake it?’ She little knew the temptations that were cast in his way—temptations from which she was free. He forgot how persistently he had pressed the point upon her. What would she do in case some other man were to fall in love with her, as he was almost sure to do? Yet, as he remembered her few strong simple expressions of devotion to himself, the whole extent of his love for her rushed over him; he seemed to be once more under the potent spell of her individuality—of her noble, upright, simple nature; to feel once more the magic of her beauty, which answered so harmoniously to her nature, as some Beethoven symphony answers in the grand and original carving of its outward form to the grand and original fire of the thoughts which gave it birth—as the greatest poems take the most perfect shape, and are written in the most melodiously arranged words. Yes, he knew he loved her—he knew that all the higher part of his nature loved and worshipped her; but he knew that she had clear eyes, and that oppressed him; and he knew that had those eyes beheld him, as he sat alone with Nita Bolton by the river that afternoon, they would have scorched him; had they seen Nita’s downcast face, and watched her embarrassed replies to some of his questions, or beheld the still more embarrassed silence which had been to him so eloquent, they would—how would they have looked? Never at him again with the light of love in them. He no longer said to himself that he would tell Nita to-morrow: