he with a listlessness that makes me look at him once with shrinking, perplexed eyes. For a man who is successful in his second courtship, he does not look happy; there is a chafed, disappointed expression upon his face.
"It seems to me," says Alice, "that you are two very lively people; have you been quarrelling?"
A timely upset of her son takes up my attention at this moment; but I hear Paul's answer plainly enough.
"Quarrelling, Mrs. Lovelace? I think not. I have been telling Miss Adair a story; that is all."
To Alice's sisterly looks and asides of inquiry I turn blind eyes and a blank countenance, and presently, having guided the cherub's steps past the gold and silver fish, whose watery abode he evinces a rooted determination to share, I get away, and upstairs to my own room, and lock the door. As I kneel down by my bedside, and press my knees hard against the floor, I do not say to myself that an exquisite hope that has sprung up, at unawares, in my heart is dead, slain by a sharp, swift death that, maybe, is more merciful than a haltering, lingering one. . . .
I am not conscious of thought, I only know that I thought myself rich, and that now my kingdom has passed away into other hands: my poor kingdom that was never anything but a fanciful one, and which I have seemed to see growing stately and beautiful day by day. . . . There are some miseries over which one may weep aloud with not only deep self-pity, but the pity of the world beside; there are others over which it is a shame to make one sigh, to drop one heavy tear, that can know of no relief, but must be carried about with us, a burning cross to lie on the naked, bleeding heart. . . .
"Luncheon is served," says Annette, entering half-an-hour later.
I have smoothed my untidy locks, put on fresh ribbons, rubbed
