there can never come much happiness to me from loving: I have always had so much pain mingled with it. I wish I could make myself a world outside it, as men do.'

`Now, you are returning to your old thought in a new form, Maggie - the thought I used to combat,' said Philip, with a slight tinge of bitterness. `You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape from pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium - unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven, because I am not a favourite with men.'

The bitterness had taken on some impetuosity as Philip went on speaking: the words were evidently an outlet for some immediate feeling of his own, as well as an answer to Maggie. There was a pain pressing on him at that moment. He shrank with proud delicacy from the faintest allusion to the words of love - of plighted love that had passed between them. It would have seemed to him like reminding Maggie of a promise; it would have had for him something of the baseness of compulsion. He could not dwell on the fact that he himself had not changed; for that too would have had the air of an appeal. His love for Maggie was stamped, even more than the rest of his experience, with the exaggerated sense that he was an exception - that she, that every one, saw him in the light of an exception.

But Maggie was conscience-stricken.

`Yes, Philip,' she said with her childish contrition when he used to chide her, `You are right, I know. I do always think too much of my own feelings, and not enough of others' - not enough of yours. I had need have you always to find fault with me and teach me - so many things have come true that you used to tell me.'

Maggie was resting her elbow on the table, leaning her head on her hand and looking at Philip with half- penitent dependent affection, as she said this; while he was returning her gaze with an expression that, to her consciousness, gradually became less vague - became charged with a specific recollection. Had his mind flown back to something that she now remembered? - something about a lover of Lucy's? It was a thought that made her shudder: it gave new definiteness to her present position, and to the tendency of what had happened the evening before. She moved her arm from the table, urged to change her position by that positive physical oppression at the heart that sometimes accompanies a sudden mental pang.

`What is the matter, Maggie? Has something happened?' Philip said, in inexpressible anxiety - his imagination being only too ready to weave everything that was fatal to them both.

`No - nothing,' said Maggie, rousing her latent will. Philip must not have that odious thought in his mind: she would banish it from her own. `Nothing,' she repeated, `except in my own mind. You used to say I should feel the effect of my starved life, as you called it, and I do. I am too eager in my enjoyment of music and all luxuries, now they are come to me.'

She took up her work and occupied herself resolutely, while Philip watched her, really in doubt whether she had anything more than this general allusion in her mind. It was quite in Maggie's character to be agitated by vague self-reproach. But soon there came a violent well-known ring at the door-bell resounding through the house.

`O what a startling announcement!' said Maggie, quite mistress of herself, though not without some inward flutter. `I wonder where Lucy is.'

Lucy had not been deaf to the signal, and after an interval long enough for a few solicitous but not hurried inquiries, she herself ushered Stephen in.