'Yes, my ownest boy, you have always been to me like a guardian angel. Oh, far better. Yes, let me be unorthodox while Dora isn't here. After all, a guardian angel keeps at a discreet distance, but you——'

To the girl's own astonishment she burst into tears. Her brother, it must be confessed, was rather pleased. He always a little dreaded the vein of hardness—of diablerie—of which the 'Satan letter' was so signal an example, that would at times become apparent in Stella. It clung to his mind at times like a superstition that, in a mood of angry defiance, or disgust, or impatience of the sweet inevitable humdrum of life, she might take some course which would lead to bitter misery, or, at the least, cloud and hamper the better possibilities of her nature. She was human through and through, but a mocking, ironical tone came to her over-readily. She wept very rarely, and when tears did come they became her wonderfully, and made her for a time adorably gentle. But it seemed this was not one of these occasions.

'Can you believe, my dear Stella, that my love for you will ever be less because of other ties? It seems to me rather that this new sweet love makes all other affection deeper and fuller.'

'Yes, dear, I know,' said Stella, smiling through her tears. 'It makes you feel like our Torrens after the winter rains.'

'No, I won't accept that comparison. You must think of a prettier one. Do I not know how the Torrens gets in the drought of summer? Do you believe that the leanness of dry December will ever overtake my love for you?'

'I know you will never be anything but what is dear and good. Still, it is quite evident to me that I must either get converted or married; and I fear of the two the latter is the more practicable. You see, dear,' she said in answer to a half-reproving smile, 'it is not to be endured that I should write or say anything which would vex Dora. So you and I can no longer be intimate friends. Oh, I know the atmosphere in which an average clergyman's daughter is brought up. There is a standard for everything—there are so many clauses of a creed, so many articles to be believed. Then all the evil and misery and astounding chaos of life is made out to be a jumble between God and the devil and man's free-will. Sometimes it is one, sometimes the other—but the reputed Creator of all must never be blamed. And in the face of everything there must be an amazing kind of optimism—a thing that leads a precarious kind of existence by brigandage on the understanding, by injecting minute doses of morphia into the pores of reason. Judge how many letters of mine could be anything but a snare and a grief to one who has been saturated with that way of thinking.'

'My dear, you must not talk like that,' he said, taking her slim, fair hands between his brown, vigorous ones. 'If I did not know you so well I should be afraid you and Dora would not get on. But you rail against most people theoretically, and end by charming all—as you certainly will charm this dear new sister who is to be.'

'You speak as though a sister were a kind of rare exotic to me, Cuthbert. Don't forget that I already have six. Yes, certainly I must always count myself, and this, with Hector and Claude's wives, makes up the unromantic half-dozen—then Dora seven. Did you know that the sacredness of the number seven was fast rooted in the pre-Semitic civilization of Babylon?'

'I know that you are sometimes the most whimsical monkey under the sun, and that to this day I don't always know when you are in fun or in earnest.'

'I am in earnest now, Cuth. I wish you every joy and blessing. Yes; now I have got over the first shock. To-morrow I shall be glad that you are happier; the day after that I shall begin to love Dora. God bless you, Cuthbert!'