Had she been honest to her better womanhood,--had she still possessed the "child's heart," with which his remembrance and imagination had endowed her, he would have resigned every other thought save that of so smoothing the path of life for her that she might tread it easily to the end.

But now that she had disappointed him, he had, so he told himself, done with fine illusions and fair beliefs for ever.

And he had started on a lonely quest,--a search for something vague and intangible, the very nature of which he himself could not tell.

Some glimmering ghost of a notion lurked in his mind that perhaps, during his self-imposed solitary ramblings, he might find some new and unexplored channel wherein his vast wealth might flow to good purpose after his death, without the trammels of Committee-ism and Red-Tape-ism.

But he expected and formulated nothing,--he was more or less in a state of quiescence, awaiting adventures without either hope or fear.