“Mrs. Blair and I used to talk it over when you and Margaret were children,” she continued, in the inflexible tone with which she was accustomed to carry her point.  “Even then you were fond of her.”

He looked at her with a gleam of the tolerant amusement he had caught from his father’s expression.  “Can you imagine anything more certain to turn a man against a marriage than the thought that it was arranged for him in his infancy?” he objected.

“Not if he knew that his mother had set her heart on it?” She looked hurt but resolute.

“Don’t set your heart on it, Mother.  Let me dree my own weird.”

“My dear boy, it is for your own good.  I am sure that you know I am not thinking of myself.  I may say with truth that I never think of myself.”

It was true.  She never thought of herself; but he had sometimes wondered what worse things could have happened if she had occasionally done so.

“I know that, Mother,” he answered simply.

“I have but one wish in life and that is to see my children happy,” she said, with an air of injured dignity which made him feel curiously guilty.

It was the old infallible method, he knew.  She would never yield her point; she would never relax her pressure; she would never admit defeat until he married another woman.

“I want nobody else in your place, Mother.  Goodnight, and try to set your heart on something else.”

As he undressed a little later he was thinking of Margaret—­of her low white brow under the “widow’s peak,” of her soft blue eyes, of her goodness and gentleness, and of the thrill in her voice when she had made that touching confession.  Margaret’s voice was the last thing he thought of before falling asleep; but hours afterward, when the dawn was beginning to break, he dreamed of Patty Vetch in her red cape and of that hidden country of the endless roads and the far horizons.

CHAPTER VI

MAGIC

The next day after luncheon, as Stephen walked from his club to his office, he lived over again his evening with Margaret.  “If she cared for me it might be different,” he mused; and then, through some perversity of memory, Margaret’s pensive smile became suddenly charged with emotion, and he asked himself if he had not misinterpreted her innocent frankness?  Even if she cared, he knew that she would die rather than betray her preference by a word or a look.  “Whether she cares or not, and it is just possible that she does care in her heart, she will marry me if I ask her,” he thought; and decided immediately that there was no necessity to act impulsively in the matter.  “If I ask her she will persuade herself that she loves me.  She will marry me just as hundreds of women have married men in the past; and we should probably live as long and as happily as all the others.”  That was the way his father and mother had married; and