snatched a fearful joy from the performance of the most trivial
functions of life.

Yet always he remembered that it could not last; always he remembered
that in the autumn Patricia was to marry Lord Pevensey. She sometimes
gave him letters to mail which were addressed to that nobleman. He
wondered savagely what was in them; he posted them with a vicious shove;
and, for the time, they caused him acute twinges of misery. But not for
long; no, for, in sober earnest, if some fantastic sequence of events
had made his one chance of winning Patricia Stapylton dependent on his
spending a miserable half-hour in her company, Rudolph Musgrave could
not have done it.

As for Miss Stapylton, she appeared to delight in the cloistered,
easy-going life of Lichfield. The quaint and beautiful old town fell
short in nothing of her expectations, in spite of the fact that she had
previously read John Charteris's tales of Lichfield,--"those effusions
which" (if the _Lichfield Courier-Herald_ is to be trusted) "have
builded, by the strength and witchery of record and rhyme, romance and
poem, a myriad-windowed temple in Lichfield's honor--exquisite,
luminous, and enduring--for all the world to see."

Miss Stapylton appeared to delight in the cloistered easy-going life of
Lichfield,--that town which was once, as the outside world has
half-forgotten now, the center of America's wealth, politics and
culture, the town to which Europeans compiling "impressions" of America
devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and
Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that,
and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater.