How much did he care about it?
how much would he regret it?
Supposing his extraordinary father really cut him off?
Beryl felt she did not know.

And therewith came the recurrent pang--how little she really knew about the man to whom she was engaged! She adored him.

Every fibre in her slight sensitive body still remembered the moment when he first kissed her, when she first felt his arm about her.

But since--how often there had been moments when she had been conscious of a great distance between them--of something that did not fit--that jarred! For herself, she could never remember a time since she was seventeen when Aubrey Mannering had not meant more to her than any one else in the world.

On his first departure to France, she had said good-bye to him with secret agonies of spirit, which no one guessed but her mother, a colourless, silent woman, who had a way of knowing unexpectedly much of the people about her.