“Morland is very dear to me. You, his future wife, have grown dear to me also. I suppose I have lived rather a simple sort of life and take my emotions seriously.” “I hope you thank God for it,” said Norma. The swift rattle of a carriage turning into the drive broke the talk, which had grown too personal to be left voluntarily. Jimmie felt infinitely grateful to the visitors, like a man suddenly saved from a threatening precipice. Leaving Norma with a bow, he fled into the house and selecting a book from the library, went onto the terrace. He needed solitude. Something of which he was unaware was happening. Circumstances were not the same as when he had first arrived. Then he had looked on Norma with brave serenity. He was happy, loving her and receiving frank friendship from her condescending hands. Now it was growing to be a pain to watch her face, a dread to hear her voice. Sweet intercourse had become a danger. And a few days had brought about the change. Why? Of the riot in the woman's nature he knew nothing. In his blank ignorance, seeking the cause within himself, he asked, Why? He crossed the tennis lawn, went through the little opening at the end of the hedge, and down to the seclusion of the croquet ground. Half-way along the sloping bank beneath the upper terrace some one had left a rug. He threw himself upon it, and tried like many another poor fool to reason down his hunger. But all the sensitive nerves with which the imaginative man, for his curse or his blessing, is endowed, were vibrating from head to foot. Her words sang in his ears: “Why should you care so much about what I am and what I am not?” The real answer burst passionately from his heart. He had lain there for about half an hour when a gay little laugh aroused him. “You idyllic creature!” It was Connie Deering, bewitchingly apparelled, a dainty, smiling pale yellow butterfly, holding as usual an absurd parasol over her head. “I have been looking for you all over the place,” she remarked. “They told me you were somewhere about the grounds. May I sit down?” He made room for her on the rug, and taking the parasol from her hand, closed it. She settled herself gracefully by his side. “I repeat I have been looking for you,” she said. “The overpowering sense of honour done me has deprived me of speech,” replied Jimmie, with an attempted return to his light-hearted manner. “Norma is entertaining those dreadful Spencer-Temples,” said Mrs. Deering, irrelevantly. “I must have had a premonition of their terrors, for I fled from before their path,” he said. “After all, poor people, what have they done to be called names?” he added. “They are ugly.” “So am I, yet people don't run away from me.” “I saw you run away from them,” she said with a significant nod. “I was at my bedroom window. They spoiled a most interesting little conversation.” Jimmie was startled. He looked at her keenly, but only met laughing eyes.