hope—that he himself might find in her some day more than a friend. He had often asked himself before whether he still cherished and watered the tender seedling, and as often he had honestly told himself that he did not. But Bilton's coming, and the terms he was on with Sybil, cast a light into his own dark places, and he knew that that hope was still not rooted up from his mind. And, realizing this, he realized how vital such a hope was to him.
Sybil, too, during the ten days following Bilton's arrival, had insensibly changed in her attitude towards him. Having definitely decided that he should not be her lover, she speedily began to find in him excellences as a friend which she had scarcely realized before. As a lover, she had found him wanting; a certain coarseness of nature in him prevented her from receiving him on that footing. But once off that ground, this coarseness almost ceased to offend her; at any rate, transferred on to the less intimate plane, it ranked a ' minus ' of the same calibre as one of his numerous ' pluses.' Among these, his practical qualities greatly appealed to her—his quickness at grasping the salient points of any question; his very firm hold on concrete affairs, from the quickest and securest way of tying a bootlace to his lucid exposition of American finance, as typified in that Napoleon, Lewis Palmer, or his knowledge in his own business of what constituted a play that would draw. On a hundred occasions every day she had some exhibition of this brought to her notice; in whatever he did or said he showed efficiency. That quality, as she had settled, was not one to be loved, but socially she delighted in it. Moreover, the force she had feared seemed to be in abeyance. He made no demands on her nervous energies that she recognised as demands.
Now, love, though proverbially blind, is often very prone to see something which has no existence whatever, and before long Charlie began to conjure up a very complete
