shadow, half timid, half expectant in her clear eyes which permitted him to believe that she was partly prepared. When they reached the summit, stood clear of the pine trees by an ancient stone Calvary, Ploumariel lay below them, very fair in the light of the setting sun; and they stopped to rest themselves, to admire. “Ploumariel is very beautiful,” said Campion after a while. “Ah! Marie-Ursule, you are fortunate to be here.” “Yes.” She accepted his statement simply, then suddenly: “You should not go away.” He smiled, his eyes turning from the village in the valley to rest upon her face; after all, she was the daintiest picture, and Ploumariel with its tall slate roofs, its sleeping houses, her appropriate frame. “I shall come back, I shall come back,” he murmured. She had gathered a bunch of ruddy heather as they walked, and her fingers played with it now nervously. Campion stretched out his hand for it. She gave it him without a word. “I will take it with me to London,” he said; “I will have Morbihan in my rooms.” “It will remind you--make you think of us sometimes?” For answer he could only touch her hand lightly with his lips. “Do you think that was necessary?” And they resumed their homeward way silently, although to both of them the air seemed heavy with unspoken words. III When he was in London--and it was in London that for nine months out of the twelve Benedict Campion was to be found--he lived in the Temple, at the top of Hare Court, in the very same rooms in which he had installed himself, years ago, when he gave up his Oxford fellowship, electing to follow the profession of letters. Returning there from Ploumariel, he resumed at once, easily, his old avocations. He had always been a secluded man, living chiefly in books and in the past; but this year he seemed less than ever inclined to knock at the hospitable doors which were open to him. For in spite of his reserve, his diffidence, Campion’s success might have been social, had he cared for it, and not purely academic. His had come to be a name in letters, in the higher paths of criticism; and he had made no enemies. To his success indeed, gradual and quiet as this was, he had never grown quite accustomed, contrasting the little he had actually achieved with all that he had desired to do. His original work was of the slightest, and a book that was in his head he had never found time to write. His name was known in other ways, as a man of ripe knowledge, of impeccable taste; as a born editor of choice reprints, of inaccessible classics: above all, as an authority--the greatest, upon the literature and the life (its flavour at once courtly, and mystical, had to him an unique charm) of the seventeenth century. His heart was in that age, and from much lingering over it, he had come to view modern life with a curious detachment, a sense of remote hostility: Democracy, the Salvation Army, the novels of M. Zola--he disliked them all impartially. A Catholic by long