gravity in youth is succeeded by a desire for action and enjoyment.  Annabel’s disposition to study did not return, though quietness was once more restored to her surroundings.  And thus, though the settlement at Eastbourne seemed a relief, she soon found that it did not effect all she hoped.  Her father began to take up his books again, though in a desultory, half-hearted way.  Annabel could not do even that.  A portion of each day she spent with Mrs. Ormonde; often she walked by herself on the shore; a book was seldom in her hand.

Two or three days before the end of March, Mr. Newthorpe spoke of Egremont.

’I should like to see him.  May I ask him to come and spend a day with us, Annabel?’

‘Do by all means, father,’ she answered.  ’Mrs. Ormonde heard from him yesterday.  He came into possession of his library-building the other day.’

‘I will write, then.’

This was Monday; on Wednesday morning Egremont came.  The nine months or so which had passed since these three met had made an appreciable change in all of them.  When Egremont entered the room where father and daughter were expecting him, he was first of all shocked at the wasting and ageing of Mr. Newthorpe’s face, then surprised at the difference he found in Annabel—­this, too, of a kind that troubled him.  He thought her less beautiful than she had been.  With no picture of her to aid him, he had for long periods been unable to make her face really present to his mind’s eye—­one of the sources of his painful debates with himself.  When it came, as faces do, at unanticipated moments, he saw her as she looked in walking back with him from the lake-side, when she declared that the taste of the rain was sweet.  Is it not the best of life, that involuntary flash of memory upon instants of the eager past?  Better than present joy, in which there is ever a core of disappointment; better, far better, than hope, which cannot warm without burning.  Annabel was surpassingly beautiful as he knew her in that brief vision.  Beautiful she still was, but it was as if a new type of loveliness had come between her and his admiration; he could regard her without emotion.  The journey from London had been one incessant anticipation, tormented with doubt.  Would her presence conquer him royally, assure her dominion, convert his intellectual fealty to passionate desire?  He regarded her without emotion.

Yet Annabel was not so calm as she wished to be.  Only by force of will could she exchange greetings without evidence of more than friendly pleasure.  This irritated her, for up to an hour ago she had said that his coming would in no way disturb her.  When, after an hour’s talk, she left her father and the guest together, and went up to her room, the first feeling she acknowledged to herself was one of disappointment.  Egremont had changed, and not, she thought, for the better.  He had lost something—­perchance that freshness of purpose which had become him so well.  He seemed to talk of his undertakings less spontaneously, and in a tone—­she could not quite say what it was, but his tone perhaps suggested the least little lack of sincerity.  And her agitation when he entered the room?  It had meant nothing, nothing.  Her nerves were weak, that was all.