CHAPTER XI.

Now, it is a shocking thing to say, I know, but

it is nevertheless a fact, that in the world of living men and women this strange thing frequently happens: you may marry the man of your choice (or two men of your choice, or three), and be perfectly devoted to him, without ever knowing what it is to be divinely in love.

Let us put it in another way, less offensive to the conventional public and the orthodox reviewer. In real life the supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. Pooh! A girl of that age is improving herself under music-masters and such like, and learning from her mother how to sew and to keep house-or she ought to be, since it is the first chance she gets. She knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and not a bit more; and the human male of these days, so highly developed, so subtly compounded, has grown out of the stage when that

much would satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers to the hero of fiction-a man who must have left not his teens only, but his twenties behind him. Married or single, both must grow and grow, must live every day of their lives, and drink deep of the wells of knowledge, ere they can attain to that experience which makes us gods amongst living things.

Our little minx, who had had lovers by the score, and two of the best of husbands, was thirtyone before she fell in love herself in the true sense of the term. At twenty she had imagined that her heart was buried in Jack Primrose's grave; at twenty-six, that she had finally interred it in that of Colin Mackenzie. But what she called her heart was like an unborn child in their timegrowing and growing, ever stronger and completer, ever nearer to the light, but inaccessible to them and an unfathomed mystery to herself. until, in the fulness of days, she met the man whom circumstances had qualified to be the right man, did it burst forth and live, understanding that it was alive; and then it had, practically, the accumulated force of a dozen years of unspent passion in it.

Not

On her thirty-first birthday she sighed to think how old she was, and Rosamond Ellis, a year her

junior, did not tell her-what any intelligent person of forty could have done-that she was a lovelier woman than she had ever been, a woman in the summer of her days, in the perfect flower of her life, the potential sovereign of a kingdom far greater than any she had yet ruled over.

That day she spent with her two Australian sisters, the morning with Mrs. Ellis, whose house was her home, the evening with Mrs. Sheffield, who had a large party in her honour, including the captain of a P. & O. steamer that had just arrived in port. In the afternoon she made a luxurious journey with a maid, and a gold-mounted dressingbag, and so on, reaching Florrie's just in time for dinner, for which she dressed, in honour of the occasion, in about five thousand pounds' worth of diamonds-for she was a lavish little person in those days. Before night she had discovered for herself that she was far from being an old woman, in any sense of the term; and before the next night she was fully awake to the fact that the seventh heaven of human existence was but just opening to her view. Three days later she came home, transfigured, treading upon air. Her sister and brother-in-law could not think what had happened to her. She had received and refused so many handsome offers of marriage, and she had

seemed so sensible in regard to her husband's will, so settled in her determination to remain a widow and preserve her large fortune for her own family, that no suspicion of a love affair occurred to them. They wrote to Florrie, but Florrie had no information to give them, beyond the fact that Nancy had been the most brilliant figure in the birthday party, and really looked quite a girl still, though unmistakably getting on in years.

And Nancy held her tongue; that is to say, she kept her secret for four long months-even from Rosamond. Rosamond used to tell her husband everything, and Tom Ellis was absurdly particular about the connections and antecedents of all who aspired to the hand of his ward. More

over, Tom and Rosie's children were down in their aunt's will for a sum considerably larger than the capital of a thousand a year amounted to.

But there were times during those four months, especially recent mail times, when she felt that she must talk to somebody or burst. And at last she let herself go.

The sisters were sitting in the hall of Rosamond's house-a spacious hall, with extensive Persian carpets on the parquet floor, and a lovely red-gum fire on the hearth-on a certain afternoon in June; that is to say, one of them was sitting

there. Mrs. Ellis, grown fat, and always tranquil, reclined at ease in a well-cushioned basket-chair, her foot on the fender and a tea-table at her side, placidly knitting a jacket for her sixth baby. Mrs. Mackenzie could not sit still for a moment. She was all the time flitting out to the veranda, and trailing back, and flitting out again, until her restlessness culminated in an outburst of rage.

"Oh, dash that idiot of a boy!" she cried, stamping her foot. "Why does Tom keep such a lazy little scamp? He's had time to go to the post and back again fifty times!"

"No, he hasn't," said Rosamond, in her soft, comfortable voice, looking at the clock on the hall mantel-piece. "He is never back before half past four."

"And it's now twenty minutes to five."

"They are always a little later on English mail days. What are you in such a hurry for? Whom do you expect to hear from?”

"Oh, never you mind. When it's time to get one's letters, one ought to get them. I wish I had had North Wind saddled and ridden in myself."

She caught up the tail of her gown—a resplendent yellow satin tea-gown, richly trimmed with. brown fur-and ran out of the hall again, hearing a faint sound of hoofs on the soft winter grass.