a general favourite. Men admired her for her sparkling prettiness, and women took to her readily: she was easy to get on with, and she gave pleasant parties. She did not, however, form particular friendships with her own sex; she was a little shy with women and preferred male society, which is not unusual in the case of a woman whose life has been spent in schoolrooms in the unexciting transition from student to teacher, surrounded always with an atmosphere of immature femininity. Pamela never quite grasped the feminine mind, and had little sympathy with its restricted outlook. This inability to comprehend the sex of which she was a representative, she attributed to the fact that, having been saturated with feminine principles from her youth up, she had become so confused with its mass of inconsistencies that she failed utterly to realise its finer qualities. The brain of the woman teacher is usually developed on one-sided lines. Indeed, the chief failing of the average woman lies in the fact that she refuses to look at life all round, but persists in regarding it from her sole point of view; and the point of the woman is to ignore realities if by chance they happen to affront her. A want of sincerity therefore mars the beautiful vision of life.

Pamela did not consciously look at life from any particular point. So far the world had treated her well; and she accepted the pleasant condition of things, and was undemonstratively grateful.

One cloud there was in her serene sky of happiness, and that was that she had no son; the pretty little girl in the nursery had been a disappointment. Arnott, himself, had not desired children: the birth of the baby had vexed him, and Pamela’s hunger for a male addition was a further aggravation. He could not understand, he told her, why one kid would not suffice. Children were a responsibility, and gave more trouble than pleasure. Certainly he derived no pleasure from his child, and Pamela was very careful that it should not be a trouble to him. She seldom had the child with her when he was present: small children possibly worried him, she decided; when the baby grew older she would make a place for herself in his heart.

“And then,” she reflected, with a little rueful smile, “my nose will be out of joint.”

It was odd what a pang this prospective jealousy caused her. She could not bear the thought of sharing her husband’s love, even with her child. And yet there was room in her own heart for both.

“I am so happy, Herbert,” she said, as they paced the garden path together in the summer dusk. “It doesn’t seem right, somehow, to be so entirely satisfied. I feel at times that it is too good to last. How can it? One can’t go on being happy for ever.”

“Why not?” he said gruffly. “So long as one has health one can always enjoy.”

“Ah! but it needs more than health,” she returned. “We have such a lot of other things. Surely we shall be required to pay back some day?”

“Rot!” he answered testily. “Why should one pay for one’s rights? Happiness is a right. We’ve got it. We’ll keep it. Hold fast to it, little girl, and don’t encourage morbid superstition.”

He stood still in the path, and took her face between his hands, and held it so, imprisoned.

“By God!” he cried, with sudden, swift vehemence, “no power on earth shall wrest mine from me. My happiness is bound up in you, and only death can take it from me. You aren’t going to escape me that way, Pam,—you are so exuberantly alive.”

Pamela laughed softly, and twined her arms about his neck, drawing closer to him.

“But you’d love me sick, dear?” she said... “You’d love me sick just the same? If you were bed-ridden I’d only love you the more tenderly.”

“Fishing as usual,” he returned, and kissed her. “A fine emotional scene for a middle-aged married man. One would suppose we had been married five months instead of five good years.”

“Five good years!” Pamela repeated, and added presently, “And they have been good. I wonder if I had never met you what I should be doing now?”

“You’d have met some one else,” he answered. “Matrimony is so much more your forte than anything else.”

“And you?” she hazarded. “Would you have met some one too?”

“No,” he replied with a convincing directness which gratified her immensely, so that she desired to kiss him again, and only refrained from fear of irritating him with an excess of emotionalism. “I didn’t set out with that idea in my mind. I should be exploring the interior, as I purposed doing—and probably have become a physical wreck with fever and other ills. You saved me from that when you bewitched me on the outward voyage.”

“I didn’t know I was doing it,” she returned, with a quiet, satisfied laugh. “You were such a grave, reserved person. I always felt proud when you came and talked with me.”

“You don’t feel that now,” he said banteringly.

“Not proud, no.” She slipped a hand into his. “But happy always,” she said, pressing his hand.

“Not so bad an admission after five years of it,” he remarked with reflective complacency. “I take it that proves fairly conclusively that we were meant for each other. I don’t profess to understand this old riddle of a universe, Pam; but I’ve grasped the human need at least; and it doesn’t fit in with the world’s decree that the individual should be judged according to established custom. The entire social scheme, with its restrictions and its definite rules, is nothing but a well-intentioned muddle. At the back of the new law stands the great primeval laws which refuse to be set aside.”

He broke off abruptly with a short, constrained laugh, and added jerkily:

“Which windy exposition, reduced to bald commonplace, amounts to the certainty that, having discovered my need of you and your need of me, we were bound to come together whatever forces opposed... You believe that, Pamela?”

“I—don’t—know,” Pamela answered slowly. She turned her face and searched his by the faint light of the stars. “I’m glad there weren’t any opposing forces,” she said.

“Little coward!” he responded in lighter tones... “I would face any amount of opposition for you.”

“Now—yes,” Pamela answered. “So could I for you. But—before we were married... I don’t know...”