the despatch-box where he kept the letters on his return this morning with Amelie, and read one through again. Passion vibrated there—a passion which had once been his; he could recall it perfectly; he could remember with the most vivid distinctness the rapture of desire in which he had written those sheets of adoration. It had seemed to him then that life was this: that the whole world, and whatever it contained that was lovely and worth the worship of man, found in her its completion. The best and the worst of him—for it was all of him that wrote thus—was hers, in the passionate self-abandonment of love. For that gift she had in return called him a pretty boy, and told him not to talk nonsense; but for the faculty of feeling that nonsense again for his wife he would have given everything he had. He saw and fully recognised the exquisite quality of Amelie's beauty, and the beautiful and generous soul that dwelt therein. Day by day he saw the sweet unfolding of her nature—an unfolding as silent and as perfect as the blossoming of a rose. He admired her, he felt passion for her, but a passion that never was lost and blinded by itself, as his passion for Dorothy had been. Often in that June of lilacs he had come home from seeing her, and sat for hours, as if intoxicated or stupefied, unable to speak or think even, only lie with mind open under the eye of his sun. It was that power he would have given the world to recapture.
His ramblings had led him into an outlying piece of the park which he seldom visited—a somewhat bleak, heathery upland, not more than a mile or so from the house, but away from the beauty of the wooded glades where he and Amelie had spent the morning. He was about to turn, when, at some little distance off, he saw a couple of men standing by a tall red rod planted in the ground, one of whom apparently was taking observations through some sort of telescopic instrument. About a couple of hundred yards further on was another rod, and, following the line with his eye, he
