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momentary joy transfiguring her expression when she saw that it was he. She moved as if to embrace him; transfixed by the baleful presence looming at his back, he could only stammer and retreat, until the door was closed against her. That evening he learned that a young woman had flung herself off Battersea Bridge and drowned. It was Eleanor; and the coroners jury, hearing that she was with child, brought in a verdict of suicide while the balance of her mind was disturbed.

    E DMUND'S NAME WAS NOT CONNECTED WITH THE tragedy. He was sent immediately abroad, where he remained for some months until his father resolved to settle all outstanding differences between them by dying of apoplexy. At first, his conscience troubled him sorely, but like other young men of wealth and title he learned to subdue it through the strenuous pursuit of pleasure, until everything about him was once again pleasant and agreeable. Eleanor's face, overlaid by so many others, faded from his memory, until he had only the vaguest recollection of her appearance. By the time of his fortieth birthday, she had not crossed his mind for years.
    He would have counted himself the most fortunate of men, were it not for a certain restlessness, a—not precisely boredom, but a feeling that the world had lost something of its charm. Often, of late, he had found himself neglecting the manifest delights of his gallery in favour of the empty wall, as if by sheer intensity of scrutiny he could divine, beneath the faint sheen of panelled oak, those lineaments of face and form which yet eluded him. Such was his absorption in this pursuit that he would wake, as it were, to find that upwards of an hour had vanished, leaving him restless and unsettled, incapable of responding to the voluptuousness all about him, seeking only to escape from gallery and house alike and lose himself in the great city, walking away the hours until it came time to return and dress for his evening engagements.

    S O IT WAS, ON THE AFTERNOON IN QUESTION, THAT Lord Edmund emerged from his front door, turned, as was his invariable custom, left into Cheyne Walk, and set off mechanically towards Royal Hospital Road, vaguely intending to stroll up Ebury Street and take a turn around Green Park. It was a bright, clear, spring day; a light breeze, cool and invigorating, ruffled the surface of the river. Still brooding on—he knew not exactly what—he had almost reached his turning when his attention was caught by a solitary figure on the other side of the Embankment, some fifty paces ahead of him and moving in the same direction. A tall, slender, female figure, evidently youthful to judge from a certain sinuous freedom of movement, clad in what appeared to be a soft pale gown, trimmed with dark blue or purple, and crowned by—plain even at this distance—an extraordinary cloud—no other phrase would do for it—an extraordinary cloud of auburn hair which seemed to swirl and float about her as she moved.
    Not, it must be admitted, for the first time in such a circumstance, Lord Edmund abandoned his intended route and quickened his pace along the Embankment, meaning to come up with the young woman on his side of the road and then—see what might be made to follow. But despite his best efforts, and without any visible acceleration on her part, the distance between them unaccountably refused to diminish. She betrayed not the slightest awareness of his interest; such was the abundance of the auburn cloud that he could not tell where her attention was directed, but she certainly had not turned her head towards him. She maintained, to all appearances, the same easy, sinuous, unselfconscious gait, and yet by the time they passed Chelsea Bridge he was stumbling between a rapid walk and an undignified trot; flushed, overheated, and altogether captivated. So they continued all the way along Grosvenor Road to Vauxhall Bridge, onto which, to his surprise, she turned, proceeding across the river at the same