"Why, she is cold to all the world."

And while Gilead Beck was setting himself to repair in a week the defects of his early education, Jack Dunquerque was spending his days hovering round the light of Phillis's eyes. The infatuated youth frequented the house as if it was his own. He liked it, Mrs. L'Estrange liked it, and Phillis liked it. Agatha looked with matronly suspicion for indications and proofs of love in her ward's face. She saw none, because Phillis was not in love at all. Jack to her was the first friend she made on coming out of her shell. Very far, indeed, from being in love. Jack looked too for any of those signs of mental agitation which accompany, or are supposed to accompany, the birth of love. There were none. Her face lit up when she saw him; she treated him with the frankness of a girl who tells her brother everything; but she did not blush when she saw him, nor was she ever otherwise than the sweetest and lightest-hearted of sisters. He knew it, and he groaned to think of it. The slightest sign would have encouraged him to speak; the smallest indication that Phillis felt something for him of what he felt for her would have been to him a command to tell what was in his heart. But she made no sign. It was Jack's experience, perhaps, which taught him that he is a fool who gives his happiness to a woman before he has learned to divine her heart. Those ever make the most foolish marriages who are most ignorant of the sex. Hooker, the Judicious is a case in point, and many a ghostly man could, from his country parsonage, tell the same tale.

Jack was not like the Judicious Divine; he was wary, though susceptible; he had his share of craft and subtlety; and yet he was in love, in spite of all that craft, with a girl who only liked him in return.

Had he possessed greater power of imagination he would have understood that he was expecting what was impossible. You cannot get wine out of an empty bottle, nor reap corn without first sowing the seed; and he forgot that Phillis, who was unable to read novels, knew nothing, positively nothing, of that great passion of Love which makes its victims half divine. It was always necessary, in thinking of this girl, to remember her thirteen years of captivity. Jack, more than any other person, not excepting Agatha L'Estrange, knew what she would say and think on most things. Only in this matter of love he was at fault. Here he did not know because here he was selfish. To all the world except Jack and Agatha she was an impossible girl; she said things that no other girl would have said; she thought as no one else thought. To all those who live in a tight little island of their own, fortified by triple batteries of dogma, she was impossible. But to those who accepted and comprehended the conditions of Phillis's education she was possible, real, charming, and full of interest.

Jack continually thought what Phillis would say and what she would think. For her sake he noticed the little things around him, the things among which we grow up unobservant. We see so little for the most part. Things to eat and drink interest us; things that please the eye; fair women and rare wine. We are like cattle grazing on the slopes of the Alps. Around us rise the mountains, with their ever-changing marvels of light and colour; the sunlight flashes from their peaks; the snow-slopes stretch away and upwards to the deep blues beyond in curves as graceful as the line of woman's beauty; at our feet is the belt of pines perfumed and warmed by the summer air; the mountain stream leaps, bubbles, and laughs, rushing from the prison of its glacier cave; high overhead soars the Alpine eagle; the shepherds yodel in the valleys; the rapid echoes roll the song up into the immeasurable silence of the hills,—and amid all this we browse and feed, eyes downward turned.

So this young man, awakened by the quick sympathies of the girl he loved, lifted his head, taught by her, and tried to catch, he too, something of the childlike wonder, the appreciative admiration, the curious enthusiasm, with which she saw everything. Most men's thoughts are bound by the limits of their club at night, and their chambers or their offices by day; the suns rise and set, and the outward world is unregarded. Jack learned from Phillis to look at these unregarded things. Such simple pleasures as a sunset, the light upon the river, the wild flowers on the bank, he actually tasted with delight, provided that she was beside him. And after a day of such Arcadian joys he would return to town, and find the club a thirsty desert.

If Phillis had known anything about love, she would have fallen in love with Jack long before; but she did not. Yet he made headway with her, because he became almost necessary to her life. She looked for his coming; he brought her things he had collected in his "globe trotting;" he told her stories of adventure; he ruined himself in pictures; and then he looked for the love softening of her eyes, and it came not at all.

Yet Jack was a lovable sort of young man in maidens' eyes. Everybody liked him to begin with. He was, like David, a youth of a cheerful, if not of a ruddy countenance. Agatha L'Estrange remarked of him that it did her good to meet cheerful young men—they were so scarce. "I know quantities of young men, Phillis my dear; and I assure you that most of them are enough to break a woman's heart even to think of. There is the athletic young man—he is dreadful indeed, only his time soon goes by; and there is the young man who talks about getting more brain power. To be sure, he generally looks as if he wants it. There is the young man who ought to turn red and hot when the word Prig is used. There is the bad young man who keeps betting-books; and the miserable young man who grovels and flops in a Ritualist church. I know young men who are envious and backbite their friends; and young men who aspire to be somebody else; and young men who pose as infidels, and would rather be held up to execration in a paper than not to be mentioned at all. But, my dear, I don't know anybody who is so cheerful and contented as Jack. He isn't clever and learned, but he doesn't want to be; he isn't sharp, and will never make money, but he is better without it; and he is true, I am sure."

Agatha unconsciously used the word in the sense which most women mean when they speak of a man's truth. Phillis understood it to mean that Jack Dunquerque did not habitually tell fibs, and thought the remark superfluous, But it will be observed that Agatha was fighting Jack's battle for him.

After all, Jack might have taken heart had he thought that all these visits and all this interest in himself were but the laying of the seed, which might grow into a goodly tree.

"If only she would look as if she cared for me, Tommy," he bemoaned to Ladds.

"Hang it! can't expect a girl to begin making eyes at you."

"Eyes! Phillis make eyes! Tommy, as you grow older you grow coarser. It's a great pity. That comes of this club life. Always smoking and playing cards."

Tommy grinned. Virtue was as yet a flower new to Jack Dunquerque's buttonhole, and he wore it with a pride difficult to dissemble.

"Better go and have it out with Colquhoun," Tommy advised. "He won't care. He's taken up with his old flame, Mrs. Cassilis, again. Always dangling at her heels, I'm told. Got no time to think of Miss Fleming. Great fool, Colquhoun. Always was a fool, I believe. Might have gone after flesh and blood instead of a marble statue. Wonder how Cassilis likes it."

"There you go," cried Jack impatiently. "Men are worse than women. At Twickenham one never hears this foolish sort of gossip."

"Suppose not. Flowers and music, muffins, tea, and spoons. Well, the girl's worth it, Jack; the more flowers and music you get the better it will be for you. But go on and square it with Colquhoun."