So, under the circumstances, it was scarcely to be wondered that Neville hesitated to introduce the subject of Valerie West as he sat in the parlour at Spindrift House with his father and mother, reading the Tribune or the Evening Post or poring over some ancient tome of travels, or looking out across the cliffs at an icy sea splintering and glittering against a coast of frozen adamant.

At length he could remain no longer; commissions awaited him in town; hunger for Valerie gnawed ceaselessly, unsubdued by his letters or by hers to him.

“Mother,” he said, the evening before his departure, “would it surprise you very much if I told you that I wished to marry?”

“No,” she said, tranquilly; “you mean Stephanie Swift, I suppose.”

[Illustration:  “Tall, transparently pale, negative in character.”]

His father glanced up over his spectacles, and he hesitated; then, as his father resumed his reading: 

“I don’t mean Stephanie, mother.”

His father laid aside his book and removed, the thin gold-rimmed spectacles.

“I understand from Lily that we are to be prepared to receive Stephanie Swift as your affianced wife,” he said.  “I shall be gratified.  Stephen Swift was my oldest friend.”

“Lily was mistaken, father.  Stephanie and I are merely very good friends.  I have no idea of asking her to marry me.”

“I had been given to understand otherwise, Louis.  I am disappointed.”

Louis Neville looked out of the window, considering, yet conscious of the hopelessness of it all.

“Who is this girl, Louis?” asked his mother, pulling the white-and-lilac wool shawl closer around her thin shoulders.

“Her name is Valerie West.”

“One of the Wests of West Eighth Street?” demanded his father.

The humour of it all twitched for a moment at his son’s grimly set jaws, then a slight flush mantled his face: 

“No, father.”

“Do you mean the Chelsea Wests, Louis?”

“No.”

“Then we—­don’t know them,” concluded his father with a shrug of his shoulders, which dismissed many, many things from any possibility of further discussion.  But his mother’s face grew troubled.

“Who is this Miss West?” she asked in a colourless voice.

“She is a very good, very noble, very cultivated, very beautiful young girl—­an orphan—­who is supporting herself by her own endeavours.”

“What!” said his father, astonished.

“Mother, I know how it sounds to you, but you and father have only to meet her to recognise in her every quality that you could possibly wish for in my wife.”

“Who is she, Louis!” demanded his father, casting aside the evening newspaper and folding up his spectacles.

“I’ve told you, father.”

“I beg to differ with you.  Who is this girl?  In what description of business is she actually engaged?”