Just why it was that Roderick should not logically have fancied Miss Garland, his companion would have been at loss to say, but I think the conviction had its roots in an unformulated comparison between himself and the accepted suitor.

Roderick and he were as different as two men could be, and yet Roderick had taken it into his head to fall in love with a woman for whom he himself had been keeping in reserve, for years, a profoundly characteristic passion.

That if he chose to conceive a great notion of the merits of Roderick's mistress, the irregularity here was hardly Roderick's, was a view of the case to which poor Rowland did scanty justice.

There were women, he said to himself, whom it was every one's business to fall in love with a little--women beautiful, brilliant, artful, easily fascinating.

Miss Light, for instance, was one of these; every man who spoke to her did so, if not in the language, at least with something of the agitation, the divine tremor, of a lover.