thread.'

'I know,' she said again—'I have thought of that. I have thought of nothing but you since I first met you a year ago. But if I might only love and serve you and be with you! And I am so rich, too. If I might only take away those money troubles which you once spoke of long ago! If I might only give you everything I have! The money is the smallest part of it—oh, such a little, little part compared to——' And she looked imploringly at him.

He was deeply moved.

'My child,' he said again, and the ominous repetition of the word shook her fragile edifice of hopes to its brittle foundation, 'you have always looked upon me as a friend, have you not?'

She shook her head.

'Well, then,' he added, correcting himself, 'as one who cared for and understood you, and whose earnest wish was to see you happy?'

She did not answer.

He had known difficult hours, but none more difficult than this. He felt as if he were trying with awkward hands to hold a butterfly without injuring it, in order to release it from the pane of glass against which it was beating its butterfly heart out.

'To see you happy,' he went on, with authority as well as tenderness in his level voice. 'I should never see that; I should have no real'—he hesitated—'affection for you at all if I allowed you to make such a woeful mistake in your early youth before you know what love and life are. They are terrible things, Sibyl; I have known them. This beautiful generous feeling which you have for me is not love, and I should be base indeed to allow you to wreck your life upon it, your youth upon the rock of my age. You offer you know not what; you would sacrifice you know not what.' He smiled gravely at her, endeavouring to soothe her growing agitation. 'It would be like taking the Koh-i-Noor out of the hand of a child. I could not do it.'

Her mind was in too great a tumult wholly to understand him, but one thing was clear to her, namely, that he was refusing to marry her. She snatched her hands out of his, and, starting wildly to her feet with an inarticulate cry, ran a short distance and flung herself down on her face among the bracken.

He looked after her, but he did not follow her. He could do no more, and a sense of exhaustion and distress was upon him. He had been clumsy. He had hurt the poor butterfly, after all.

He sat a long time on the tree-trunk, the low sunshine on his worn, patient face, on which the refinement of suffering and of thought had set their indelible stamp. And now the thin high features wore a new look of present distress over the old outlived troubles, a new look which anyone who really loved him would have been heart-stricken to have called into it. But when love ceases to wound its object, and bears its own cross, it has ceased to be young.

As he sat motionless the sun sank. Far in the amber west the heavens had opened in an agony of glory. The knotted arms of the great oaks, upraised like those of Moses and his brethren, shone red as flame against the darkness of the forest. The first hint of chill after the great heat came into the still air.

Mr. Loftus rose and went slowly towards the prostrate figure in its delicate gleaming gown.

'Sibyl,' he said gently, but with authority, 'you must get up. I see Doll and your cousin coming up the glade to meet us.'

Sibyl started violently and raised herself, turning a white, hopeless face towards him. Her entire self-abandonment, which would have brought acute humiliation to another woman, brought none to her. Her despair was too complete to admit of any other feeling.

'Like a child's,' he thought, as he looked at her sorrowing.

He helped her to smooth her gown, and he set her hat straight, and took some pieces of dried bracken out of her crumpled shining hair. She let him do it, neither helping nor hindering him. She evidently did not care what impression might be made on the minds of the two young people leisurely approaching them. She would have lain on the ground if it had been a bog instead of dry turf until the ice fit of despair had passed. His thoughtfulness for her, and the ashen tint of his face, were nothing to her, any more than the moonshine is to the child who has cried for the moon and has been denied it.

At Mr. Loftus's bidding they went slowly to meet the others.

'Doll,' said Mr. Loftus, lingering behind as Peggy and Sibyl walked on together, 'give me your arm. I feel ill.'

'Won't she have me?' said Doll, biting his lip.

'No, my poor boy, she won't.'

CHAPTER II.

The laws of attraction remain a mystery. Their results we see. Glimpses of their workings can occasionally be caught in their broken fragments. But the curve by which the circle may be drawn is nowhere to be found among those fragments. The first cause we cannot see. With sacrilegious hands we may rend the veil of its temple in the sacred name of truth, but we shall find nothing in its holy of holies save the bloodstains of generations of sacrifices on its empty altar, and the place where the ark has been.

Youth, beauty, wit—all these attract; but they are only the momentary disciples of a great master, and their power is from him. In his name they perform a few works, and cast out a few small devils.

But now and again a nature appears in our midst in the presence of which youth sinks its voice, and beauty pales and hangs its head, and wit bends its knee in reverence.

What talisman had Mr. Loftus brought into the world with him that disinterested love and devotion should with one exception have followed him all the days of his life? But whether it had been given to him at his birth, or he had found it alone upon the hillside, or Sorrow, who has many treasures in her lap, but will never give them to those who turn from her, gave it to him when he kissed her hand—however this may have been, he had it.

He had gone through his difficult life little realizing how much he owed to the impersonal love and respect which he inspired in men and women, as a beautiful woman seldom realizes how life has been coloured for her by the colour of her hair and eyes.

His poetic exalted nature, with its tender affections, its deep passions, with its refinement and its delicacy of feeling, too sensitive to bear contact with this rough world, and yet not content to dwell apart from awkward fellow-creatures who wounded when they touched it, had leaned twice on the frail reed of personal love, and twice it had pierced his hand. After the second time he withdrew his scarred hand in silence, and journeyed on with it in his bosom.

In the days of his youth he had been swept into the vortex of a deep passion which for the time engulfed his whole being. His early marriage and his romantic love, and his young wife's desertion of him, consumed like a rolling prairie-fire his early life. But he had emerged with the mark of fire upon him, and had taken up life again, and had made a career for himself in the world of politics.

And he had reached middle age, he was a grave man with gray in his hair, before love came to him the second time. How he fared the second time no man knew; but afterwards the love of woman, deep-rooted though it was, died down in Mr. Loftus's heart. He went quietly on his way, but the way wearied him. He