'Mummy,' said Peggy, a few days later, coming into her mother's sitting-room and pressing her round, cool cheek against Lady Pierpoint's, 'why does Sibyl want to marry Mr. Loftus?'

'Because she thinks she loves him, Peggy, as many other women have done before her.'

'I think I love him, too, in a way,' said Peggy. 'He is better than anybody. When I am with him, I feel—I don't know what I feel, only I know it's good, and I want to do something for him, or make him something really pretty for his handkerchiefs; but—I don't want to marry him.'

'That is as well, my treasure, as he is going to marry Sibyl.'

'I never thought he would marry anybody. I can't believe it. It seems as if it could not happen.'

'It will happen,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'if he lives.'

'Sibyl says,' continued Peggy, 'that he enters into her feelings as no one else does, and that she understands him, and that hardly anyone else does except her, because he is so superior.'

'Indeed!'

'And she says she can speak to him of aspirations and things that she can't even mention to Molly and me. She says it isn't our fault—it is only because we are different to her.'

'You are certainly very different,' said Lady Pierpoint, compressing her lips.

'And to think that she might have married Mr. Doll,' continued Peggy, as if Sibyl's actions were indeed inscrutable. 'Mr. Doll will be twenty-eight next August. He was twenty-seven when we were at Wilderleigh last year. If I had been Sibyl, I would have married him, and then I'll tell you, mummy, what I would have done. I would have asked Mr. Loftus to let us live with him at Wilderleigh, and I would have taken such care of him—oh! such care—and I would have spent whole bags of money on the farms and fences and things, and he would have been happy, and Mr. Doll would have been happy, too.'

'Peggy,' said Lady Pierpoint, 'shall I tell you a secret? I think that is exactly what Mr. Loftus hoped Sibyl would do.'

Mr. Loftus returned to London a day or two later, and had an interview with Doll the day before the announcement of the engagement appeared in the Morning Post.

Mr. Loftus was attached to his nephew—people always looked upon Doll as his nephew, though he was in reality his first cousin—and to him and to him alone he told the circumstances which had led to his engagement.

What passed between the elder man and the young one during that interview will never be known. But when at last Mr. Loftus left him, Doll sat for a long time looking over the geraniums into the park. The somewhat dull, unimaginative soul that dwelt behind his handsome expressionless face was vaguely stirred.

'It's a mistake,' he said at last, half aloud. 'But Uncle George is on the square; he always is.'

And when he was ruthlessly twitted next day by his brother officers on being cut out by his uncle, he replied simply enough:

'He is a better man than me, as all you fellows know. She would not have looked at one of you any more than she would at me. I suppose she had a fancy for marrying a man who could spell, which none of us can.'

'Spelling or none,' said the youngest sub—'which is an indecent subject which should never be mentioned between gentlemen—anyhow, I mean to borrow a thousand or a fiver off him. Mr. Loftus always tipped me at school.'

One of Mr. Loftus's first actions was to stop the preliminary proceedings regarding the sale of Wilderleigh, which he had been arranging a month ago, on the afternoon when he had called on Lady Pierpoint. It was like awakening from a nightmare to realize that Wilderleigh would not be sold, after all. He almost wished that he might live long enough to set the place in order for Doll.

The engagement was a nine days' wonder, and those nine days were purposely spent by Mr. Loftus in London. He was aware that many cruel things would be said at his expense, and that the bare fact that a man of his years and in his state of health should marry a young heiress, and so great an heiress as Sibyl Carruthers, must call forth unfavourable comments. People who did not know him said it was perfectly shameful, and that it was just the sort of thing which those people who posed as being so extra good always did. How shocked Mr. Loftus had pretended to be when old Lord Bugbear, after his infamous life, married a girl of seventeen! And now he, Mr. Loftus, was doing exactly the same himself. Of course he had a very fascinating manner—just the kind of manner to impose on a young girl who, like Miss Carruthers, knew nothing of the world, and had been nowhere. And everyone knew he was desperately poor. Wilderleigh could hardly pay its way. A rumour had long been afloat that it would shortly be for sale. If he had not been so hard up for money it would have been different; but it was a most disgraceful thing, and Lady Pierpoint ought to be ashamed of having exposed the poor motherless girl left in her charge to his designs upon her. They wondered how much Lady Pierpoint, whose means were narrow, had been bought over for. The sums varied according to the sordidness of the different speculators, who of course named their own price.

Others who knew Mr. Loftus were puzzled and were silent. To know him at all was to believe him to be incapable of an ignoble action; yet this marriage had the appearance of being ignoble—not, perhaps, for another man, but certainly for him. His intimate friends were distressed, and greeted him with grave cordiality and affection, and hoped for an explanation. He gave none. And they remembered that never in his public or in his private life had he been known to give an explanation of his conduct, and came to the conclusion that they must trust him.

Mr. Loftus had recognised early in life that explanations explain nothing. If those who had had opportunities of knowing him well misjudged him after those opportunities, they were at liberty to do so as far as he was concerned. The weight of an enormous acquaintance oppressed him, and, though he had never been known to wound anyone by withdrawing from an unequal friendship, which he had not been the one to begin, and which was an effort to him to continue, still, he took advantage of being misunderstood to lay aside many such friendships. It was not pride which prompted this line of action on Mr. Loftus's part, though many put it down to pride, especially those who had held aloof from him at a certain doubtful moment, and in whose regard subsequent events had entirely reinstated him, and who complained that he expected to be considered infallible. It was, in reality, the natural inclination of a world-weary man of the world to lay aside, as far as he could courteously do so, the claims of the artificial side of life, its vain forms, its empty hospitalities.

He realized that for the purpose of winnowing its friendships the various events of life may be relied on to furnish the fitting occasions. Those who do not wish to offend others by leaving them need make no effort, for they will certainly be presently deserted by those who have never grasped the meaning of the character which has been the object of their transient admiration. 'If he is unequal he will presently pass away.' Mr. Loftus neither hurried the unequal, self-constituted friend, nor sought to detain him. But when he departed, shaking the dust from off his feet, the door was noiselessly closed behind him, and his knock, however loud, was not heard when he returned again.

A small batch of uneasy admirers left him on the occasion of his engagement. They said openly that they were much disappointed in him, and that he had shaken their belief in human nature.

'Will Sibyl also pass away?' Mr. Loftus wondered, as he sat on the terrace at Wilderleigh on his return from London. 'Yes, she, too, will presently pass away; but I shall not give her time to do so. She will be absorbed by her first love for a few years, and I shall only remain a few years at longest. By the time it wanes I shall be gone, and my departure will pain her but very slightly.'

His face softened as he thought of Sibyl. His nature, which, in its far-away youth, had been imaginative and romantic, had remained sympathetic. He gauged, as few others could have done had they been the object of it, the measure of her romantic attachment to himself. It was perhaps safer in his hands than in those of a younger man. For youth perpetrates many murders and mutilations in the name of love, as the schoolboy's love of a butterfly finds expression in a pin and a cork. But it would have cut Sibyl to the heart if she had even guessed that his tranquil mind took for granted that her adoration would not last until the stars fell from heaven and the earth fell into the sun. For 'Les esprits faibles ne sont jamais sincÈres.' That is a hard saying, but alas! and alas! that it is only the weak who believe that it is not true. The strong know better, but if they are merciful they are silent.

'And so my second wife is also to be an esprit faible,' said Mr. Loftus to himself, looking at the past through half-closed eyes. 'But in the meanwhile I have learnt a lesson in natural history. I shall not expect my butterfly to hew wood and draw water. And this time I shall not break my heart because pretty wings are made to flutter with.'

And the remembrance slid through his mind of Millais's picture of the dying cavalier, and the butterfly perched upon the drawn sword in the ardent sunshine. And he thought of the drawn sword of Damocles hanging over his own life, and Sibyl's love preening itself for one brief second upon it. And at the thought he smiled.