concealed life of men; to know it and to have done with it; to settle her mind on that point, as on any other that affected the life of a reasonable being.  Yet she shrank from all such enquiry, with a sense of womanly pride, doing her best to believe that there was no concealment in the case of any man with whom she could have friendly relations.  She scorned the female cynic; she disliked the carelessly liberal in moral judgment.  Profoundly mysterious to her was everything covered by the word “passion”—­a word she detested.

Her way of seeing life on the amusing side aided, of course, her maidenly severity against trouble of sense and sentiment.  This she had from her father, a man of quips and jokes on the surface of his seriousness.  As she grew older, it threatened a decline of intimacy between her and her cousin Olga, who, never naturally buoyant, was becoming so cheerless, so turbid of temper, that Irene found it difficult to talk with her for long together.  Domestic miseries might greatly account for the girl’s mood, but Irene had insight enough to perceive that this was not all.  And she felt uncomfortably helpless.  To jest seemed unfeeling; sympathy of the sentimental sort she could not give.  She feared that Olga was beginning to shrink from her.

Since the Hannaford’s removal to London, they had not been able to see much of each other.  Irene understood that she was not very welcome in the little house at Hammersmith, even before her aunt wrote to ask her not to come.  Lee Hannaford’s aloofness from his wife’s relatives had turned to hostility; he spoke of them with increasing bitterness, threw contempt on Dr. Derwent’s scientific work, and condemned Irene as a butterfly of fashion.  Olga ceased to visit the house in Bryanston Square, and the cousins only corresponded.  It was Dr. Derwent’s opinion that Hannaford could not be quite sane; he was much troubled on his sister’s account, and had often pondered extreme measures for her rescue from an intolerable position.

At length there came to pass the event to which Mrs. Hannaford had looked as her only hope.  The widowed sister in America died, and, out of her abundance, her children all provided for, left to the unhappy wife in England a substantial bequest.  News of this came first to Dr. Derwent, who was appointed trustee.

But before he had time to communicate with Mrs. Hannaford, a letter from her occasioned him new anxiety.  His sister wrote that Olga was bent on making a most undesirable marriage, having fallen in love with a penniless nondescript who called himself an artist; a man given, it was suspected, to drink, and without any decent connection that one could hear of.  A wretched, squalid affair!  Would the Doctor come at once and see Olga?  Her father was away, as usual; of course the girl would not be influenced by him, in any case; she was altogether in a strange, wild, headstrong state, and one could not be sure how soon the marriage might come about.