and she wrote her emotions in many long pages to her cousin.  The causes of such changes she did not indeed specify, but he read between the lines, and knew it was a man and not the war that had so altered and deepened her outlook.  He had never done it, and he could not be angry with her now, for she had pretended no ardor of emotion to him.  Young though he was, he always feared that she liked him not after the way of a lover.  He had hoped to open her eyes some day, but it was given to another to do so.

He felt no surprise, therefore, when news of her engagement reached him from herself.  He wrote the letter of his life in reply, and was at pains to laugh at their boy-and-girl attachment, and lessen any regret she might feel on his account.  Her father took it somewhat hardly at first, for he held that more than sufficient misfortunes, to correct the balance of prosperity in his favor, had already befallen him.  But he was deeply attached to his daughter, and her magical change under the new and radiant revelation convinced him that she had now awakened to an emotional fulness of life which could only be the outward sign of love.  That she was in love for the first time also seemed clear; but he would not give his consent until he had seen her lover and heard all there was to know about him.  That, however, did not alarm Mary, for she believed that Thomas May must prove a spirit after Sir Walter’s heart.  And so he did.  The sailor was a gentleman; he had proposed without the faintest notion to whom he offered his penniless hand, and when he did find out, was so bewildered that Mary assured her father she thought he would change his mind.

“If I had not threatened him with disgrace and breach of promise, I do think he would have thrown me over,” she said.

And now they had been wedded for six months, and Mary sat by the great log fire with her hand in Tom’s.  The sailor was on leave, but expected to return to his ship at Plymouth in a day or two.  Then his father-in-law had promised to visit the great cruiser, for the Navy was a service of which he knew little.  Lennoxes had all been soldiers or clergymen since a great lawyer founded the race.

The game of billiards proceeded, and Henry caught his uncle in the eighties and ran out with an unfinished fifteen.  Then Ernest Travers and his wife—­old and dear friends of Sir Walter—­played a hundred up, the lady receiving half the game.  Mr. Travers was a Suffolk man, and had fagged for Sir Walter at Eton.  Their comradeship had lasted a lifetime, and no year passed without reciprocal visits.  Travers also looked at life with the eyes of a wealthy man.  He was sixty-five, pompous, large, and rubicund—­a “backwoodsman” of a pattern obsolescent.  His wife, ten years younger than himself, loved pleasure, but she had done more than her duty, in her opinion, and borne him two sons and a daughter.  They were colorless, kind-hearted people who lived in a circle of others like themselves.  The war had sobered them, and at an early stage robbed them of their younger boy.