 a big black-and-tan colley looking on at their master's knees—the beau idéal of young English manhood—frank, generous, outspoken, fearless—the men who can do and die when the need comes. Her eyes lingered affectionately on that picture as the wagonette drove away by the broad gravel sweep towards the avenue; and those two figures in the sunlight haunted her memory in the days to come.

CHAPTER XVII.

OUGHT SHE TO STAY?

A week after the drive to Wimperfield Miss Wendover received a very big box of peaches and grapes, enclosing a very brief letter from Vernon Palliser to his cousin Ida.

'My dear Ida,—I venture to send Miss Wendover some of our fruit,' he wrote, 'for I understood her to say she has not much glass, and grows only flowers. Peter and I are just off to Scotland, where I suppose we shall do a little shooting, and I hope a good deal of yachting and fishing. I wish you and that nice plump little friend of yours—Bessie, I think you called her—were coming to us. Such a jolly life, bobbing about between the islands and the mainland, with the chance of an occasional storm. But I shall look forward to seeing you again in October, when I hope Miss Wendover will bring you over to stay for a week or two. What splendid ideas she has about summering hunters!—never met a more sensible woman. Always your affectionate cousin, VERNON PALLISER.'

Aunt Betsy was pleased with the tribute of hothouse fruit, and even more gratified by that remark about summering horses.

'Your cousin is a fine thoroughbred young fellow,' she said. 'If I had not been fully satisfied you came from a good stock, by my knowledge of your own organisation, I should be sure of the fact now I have seen those two young men. They are all that Englishmen ought to be.'

Ida was silent, for to her mind there was one Englishman who more completely realised her ideal of manhood—one who was no less generous and outspoken than her kind young cousins, but whose intellectual gifts, whose highly cultivated mind, and passionate love of all that is most beautiful in life, made him infinitely their superior.

And now came, perhaps, the most bitter trial of a young life which had already seen more cloud than sunshine. The hour had come when Ida told herself that she must no longer dawdle along the flowery path of sin, no longer palter with fate. Stern duty must be obeyed, She must leave Kingthorpe. It was no longer a question of feeling, but a question
