Mrs. Newberry's arguments were unavailing. Her pleas failed and so did her eulogies of Stainton: both of Stainton the hero and Stainton the rich man. Her tears sufficed not. There was no course but to recall her luncheon engagement. Her incompetence in the matter sharpened her tongue.

They quarrelled. Muriel, in a tempest of sobbing anger, fled to her own room; Mrs. Newberry fled to the luncheon.

Upon her return Ethel found that Muriel had gone out. Preston was in his "study," studying the stock reports in the Wall Street edition of his evening paper, and to him she straightway unburdened herself.

"What do you think of it?" She breathlessly enquired.

"I think you meddled," said her husband.

"But, Preston, the child came to me. I didn't go to her."

"If you didn't, it was no fault of yours. You've been trying to get at her for God knows how long. Let her be. For Heaven's sake, let her be, Ethel. If you do, she is sure to take him, because I have always carefully given her to understand that she may expect nothing from me. I have been conscientious about that. And she must know that we are doing her a good-sized favour this winter. But if you don't let her alone, she is bound to botch the whole affair."

He put aside his newspaper and prepared to go to that one of his clubs at which he could obtain the best cocktail. As he was about to leave the house, Muriel entered it. Preston smiled.

"Hello," he said. "Been for a walk?"

The girl was flushed and patently troubled.

"Yes, Uncle Preston," she said.

"Hum. Just going myself. How's the weather?"

"Lovely," murmured Muriel. She wanted to hurry to her room.

"What? Why, when I looked out a bit ago, I was sure it was raining."

"Oh, yes; I believe it is raining. I didn't notice."

Preston chuckled. He put out a thick thumb and forefinger and pinched her cheek.

"I've always heard that love was blind," he said, "but nowadays it seems to be water-proof, too. Look here, my dear: your aunt has been dropping a hint or two to me, and I congratulate you."

"On what?" asked Muriel, bristling into immediate rebellion.

Again Preston chuckled.

"Tut, tut!" he said: he always treated her as if she were the child that he had always maintained to his wife she was not. "You know well enough. He's a fine fellow and well-to-do. Even if we could afford to keep you on here indefinitely, which of course we can't, it would be a good job. Lucky girl!"

He went out after that and left his wife's niece free again to hide herself. But not entirely. Ethel, unable to resist her desire for finality, soon tapped at Muriel's door.

"Muriel!" she called.

For some time there was no answer, though Mrs. Newberry made sure that she heard sounds within the room.

"Muriel!"

"Yes. Who is there?"

"It's me—Aunt Ethel."

"Yes, Aunt Ethel?"

"Well, Muriel—are you all right?"

"Quite, thanks."

"Don't you want anything?"

"No."

"Nothing at all?"

"Nothing at all, thank you."

Ethel hesitated.

"But, Muriel——"

The girl apparently waited for her aunt to finish the sentence that Ethel had not completed.

"Muriel——"

"Yes?"

Ethel softly tried the door: as she had supposed, it was locked.

"O, Muriel, do open the door and let me in."

"Why?"

"Because, Muriel."

"But why? I'm—I'm dressing."

"But—surely you know why, Muriel. Why won't you confide in me?"

There was a long wait for the answer to this question, but the answer, when it came, was resolute enough:

"I've nothing to confide. Please go away now, Aunt Ethel, and leave me alone. Please do."

Ethel went. She returned, of course, from time to time, whenever she could think of a new excuse or a new suggestion; but she was always worsted.

Muriel did not descend to dinner that night until she was sure that Mr. Newberry, whose deterrent attitude she instinctively counted upon, was there with her aunt. She contrived to be left alone not once with Ethel. It was the habit of the members of the Newberry household to breakfast together only by chance, which meant that they generally ate separately. When Thursday's luncheon was announced, Muriel sent down word that she had a headache.

"What do you do when a girl locks her door on you?" asked Ethel of her husband.

"They never lock their doors on me," said Preston.

"Do be serious. What in the world do you make of all this?"

"My dear," answered Newberry, "the only thing I am bothered about is what you may already have made of it. I'm afraid you have made a mess."

"But, Preston——"

"There is nothing to be done now but to wait, my dear."

So it befell that when, exactly at nine o'clock that evening, Stainton's card was sent up to Miss Stannard, Miss Stannard's guardians, one of whom stayed long in the library with ears vainly intent, were as much at sea regarding their ward's decision as was Stainton himself.

Muriel's own emotional condition was no more enlightened. Like all young people, she had had her visions of romance, and, like the visions of most young people, hers had been uninstructed, misdirected, misapplied. All women, it has been said, begin life by having in their inmost heart a self-created Prince Charming, who proves the strongest rival that their destined husbands have to endure. Such a prince was as much Muriel's as he is other girls'! She had created him unknowingly from the books she had read, from the pictures she had seen, out of blue sky and sunshine and the soft first breezes of Spring: the stuff of dreams. But she was eighteen and no longer in school, and Stainton had given her a glimpse of the great happy thing that she accepted as life.

What lacked? Something. While she descended the stairs she counted his attributes in her aching brain. He was handsome, brave, well esteemed. If he was not young, he did not seem anything but young. What was youth, that it should be essential? What did it amount to if it were but the unit of measurement for a life—a mere figure of speech—something simply verbal? This man had, it appeared, the reality without the name. What was this quality worth if its virtue resided in its name and not in its substance? Why should she even ask these questions—and why, when she asked, could she find no answer?

She paused. It struck her suddenly that the fault might lie in her. Perhaps it was she that lacked. Perhaps—as a traveller may see an unfamiliar landscape by a lightning flash—she saw this now; the loss might be not in Stainton; it might be something that she had not yet acquired.

Therein, to be sure, was the clew to the muddle. Nearer than that lightning flash of the situation she did not come. Love, as we know it in our civilisation, is not an element: it is a composite. In this girl, descending to meet the man that wanted to marry her and even now ignorant of the answer she should give him, there lay the Greater Ignorance. Companionship, affection, kindly feeling—all these things and more—she had for him; but the omnipotent force that welds and dominates and forges these elements into one, unified, spiritual, intellectual, and bodily love, the law that begets this and nourishes it—this she did not as yet know, had never known.

The Newberry drawing-room was as it had been two weeks before. The crackling fire danced over its gilt-and-white prettiness, the heavy, ivory curtains, which folded behind her, shut out all the world.

Stainton rose from a seat beside the fire, much as if he had been there since last she saw him. The interval of a fortnight seemed as nothing. She noticed again how tall and strong and fine he seemed, how virile, how much the master, not only of his own fate but of himself. He came forward with outstretched hands.

"Have you thought things over?" he asked.

There was no manoeuvring now, no backing and filling. The time for pretence was passed.

"Yes," she said. "I have thought of nothing else, and yet—and yet——"

His brows contracted slightly, but he kept his steady hand upon the tight rein by which he was accustomed to drive himself.

"And yet you aren't sure?" he supplied. "You have not been able to make up your mind?"

She hung her head. On the edge of the hearth-rug she traced a stupid figure with the toe of her bead-embroidered slipper.

"I can't tell," she said, "I've tried. I've tried very hard——"

"To love me?"

"No." She wished to be honest; she determined upon being honest. She owed him that, even should it hurt him. "No," she said, "not to love you; for if I had to try to love you, it wouldn't be real love at all, would it? What I tried to find out was whether I do love you now."

It was on his lips to say that, as surely as trying to love would not create love, so, if love was, it need not be sought. But she raised her face when she ended, and, when the light fell upon that, he forgot all casuistry. Her slim figure just entering upon womanhood, her blue-black hair, her damp red lips and her great dark eyes: she was as he had seen her first, like an evening in the woods, he reflected: warm and dusky and bathed in the light of stars.

Quite suddenly and wholly without premeditation he came to her and seized her hot palms in his cool hands. For years he had mastered passion; now, at this sight of her after the two weeks' separation, passion mastered him. The rein had snapped.

"Muriel," he said, "I can make you love me. You don't know—there are things you don't know. I can make you love me. Do you hear that? Muriel? Answer! Do you understand? I will make you love me. I will!"

She looked up at his face. It was alight as she had never yet seen any man's. Then, before she had gathered her breath to give him an answer, she was seized by him. She was crushed to him; she was held tight in his strong arms. She was hurt, and, as she was hurt, their lips met.

The miracle—oh, she was sure now that it was the miracle—happened. Something new clutched at her throat. Something new, wonderfully, terrifyingly, deliciously new, gripped at her heart and set her whole body athrill and trembling. The blood pounded in her temples. She tried to look at him, but a violet mist covered her eyes and hid him.

"Kiss me!" she was whispering as his lips left hers. "Kiss me again. I know now. I love you!"