“I hoped it might interest Angela,” he repeated, seeking in vain for sympathy in the three amazed faces.

The rabbit struggled in his grasp, and after holding it suspended a moment by the nape of its neck, he cuddled it again beneath his coat.  “A woman was selling them in the street,” he explained in a suppressed voice.  “She had a box filled with them.  I bought only one.”

“That was fortunate,” returned Mrs. Payne, severely, “for you will have to carry the creature back at once—­or drown it if you prefer.”

“But I thought Angela would like it,” he said with a disappointed look.

Angela closed her eyes as if shutting out an irritating sight.

“What in the world would I do with a white rabbit?” she enquired.

“But I could take care of it,” insisted Untie Percival.  “I should like to take care of it very much.”

Laura drew the rabbit from his coat and held it a moment against her bosom.

“It’s a pretty little thing,” she remarked carelessly, and added, “why not keep it for yourself, Uncle Percival?”

As he glanced up at her the light of animation broke in his face.

“Why shouldn’t I, indeed, why shouldn’t I?” he demanded eagerly, and hurried out before Mrs. Payne, with her Solomonic power of judgment, could bring herself to the point of interference.

“I hope that will be a lesson to you with regard to men,” she observed as a parting shot while she tied her bonnet strings.

An uncontrollable distaste for her family swept over Laura, and she felt that she could suffer no longer the authority of Mrs. Payne, the senility of Uncle Percival or the sorrows of Angela.  As she looked at Mrs. Payne she was struck as if for the first time by her ridiculous grotesqueness, and she experienced a sensation of disgust for the old lady’s stony eyes and carefully painted out wrinkles.

Without replying to the moral pointed by Uncle Percival and the white rabbit, she left the room and hastily dressed herself for her morning walk.  The house had grown close and oppressive to her and she wanted the January cold in her face and limbs.  At the moment she was impatient of anything that recalled a restraint of mind or body.

When she came in two hours later, after a brisk walk in the park, she found Mr. Wilberforce awaiting her in the drawing-room downstairs.  He looked older she thought at the first glance in the last few days, but there was a cheerfulness, a serenity, in his face which seemed to lend itself like a softening light to his beautiful pallid features.  He was a man who having fought bitterly against resignation for many years comes to it peacefully at last only to find that he has reaped from it a portion of the “enchantment of the disenchanted.”  Her intuition told her instantly that he had given up hope of love, but she recognized also, through some strange communion of sympathy, that he had attained the peace of soul which follows inevitably upon any sincere renouncement of self.