which he had adhered for years of knocking off work early and leaving his office at an hour when other men did not,--the friends were obliged to admit that this, at least, seemed sensible. There had been, though, a very sad occurrence recently in his private life,--'Oh, thank you,' interrupted the friends, 'we have heard about that.' But however good Wemyss's business record might be, it couldn't alter their violent objection to Jim's daughter marrying him. Apart from the stuff he talked, there was the inquest. They were aware that in this they were unreasonable, but they were all too much attached to Jim's memory to be able to be reasonable about a man they felt so certain he wouldn't have liked. Singly and in groups they came at safe times, such as after breakfast, to Eaton Terrace to reason with Lucy, too much worried to remember that you cannot reason with a person in love. Less wise than Miss Entwhistle, they tried to dissuade her from marrying this man, and the more they tried the tighter she clung to him. To the passion of love was added, by their attitudes, the passion of protectiveness, of flinging her body between him and them. And all the while, right inside her innermost soul, in spite of her amazement at them and her indignation, she was smiling to herself; for it was really very funny, the superficial judgments of these clever people when set side by side with what she alone knew,--the tenderness, the simple goodness of her heart's beloved. Lucy laughed to herself in her happy sureness. She had miraculously found not only a lover she could adore and a guide she could follow and a teacher she could look up to and a sufferer who without her wouldn't have been healed, but a mother, a nurse, and a playmate. In spite of his being so much older and so extraordinarily wise, he was yet her contemporary,--sometimes hardly even that, so boyish was he in his talk and jokes. Lucy had never had a playmate. She had spent her life sitting, as it were, bolt upright mentally behaving, and she hadn't known till Wemyss came on the scene how delicious it was to relax. Nonsense had delighted her father, it is true, but it had to be of a certain kind; never the kind to which the adjective 'sheer' would apply. With Wemyss she could say whatever nonsense came into her head, sheer or otherwise. He laughed consumedly at her when she talked it. She loved to make him laugh. They laughed together. He understood her language. He was her playmate. Those people outside, old and young, who didn't know what playing was and were trying to get her away from him, might beat at the door behind which he and she sat listening, amused, as long as they liked. 'How they all try to separate us,' she said to him one day, sitting as usual safe in the circle of his arm, her head on his breast. 'You can't separate unity,' remarked Wemyss comfortably.