All that she could bring to a husband was her beauty, her superb presence, her air of royalty. These gone, her chances were as illusory as those of the pinched and faded gentlewomen who tittle-tattled at Cosford tea-parties. Another year, and at the present rate of decay her beauty would have vanished into the limbo of last year's snows. She exaggerated; but what young woman of six-and-twenty placed as she has not looked tremulously in her mirror and seen feet of crows and heaven knows what imaginary fowls that prey upon female charms? At six-and-thirty she smiles with wistful, longing regret at the remembered image. Yet youth, happily, is not cognisant of youth's absurdities. It takes itself tragically. Thus did Norma. Her dowry of beauty was dwindling. She must marry within the year. Sometimes she wished that Theodore Weever, who had not yet discovered his decorative wife and had managed to find himself at various places which she had visited abroad, would come like a Paladin and deliver her from her distress and carry her off to his castle in Fifth Avenue. He would at least interest her as a human being, which Morland, with all his solid British qualities, had never succeeded in doing. But Theodore Weever had not spoken. He retained the imperturbability of the bald marble bust of himself that he had taken her to see in a Parisian sculptor's studio. There only remained Morland. But for some reason, for which she could not account, he seemed the last man on earth she desired to marry. When she had written to him, soon after her flight to Cornwall, to beg for a postponement of the wedding, giving him the very vaguest reasons for her request, he had assented with a cheerfulness ill befitting an impatient lover. It would be impertinence, he wrote, for him to enquire further into her reasons. She was too much a woman of the world to act without due consideration, and provided that he could look forward to the very great happiness of one day calling her his wife, he was perfectly satisfied with whatever she chose to arrange. The absence of becoming fervour, in spite of her desire to postpone the dreaded day, produced a feeling of irritated disappointment. None of us, least of all women, invariably like to be taken at our word. If Morland lay so little value upon her as that, he might just as well give her up altogether. She replied impulsively, suggesting a rupture of the engagement. Morland, longing for time to raise him from the abasement in which he grovelled, had welcomed the proposal to defer the marriage; but as he smarted at the same time under a sense of wrong--had he not been betrayed by his own familiar friend and the woman he loved?--he now unequivocally refused to accept her suggestion. He had made up his mind to marry her. He had made all his arrangements for marrying her. The check he had experienced had stimulated a desire which only through unhappy circumstances had languished for a brief season. He persuaded himself