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124 adorers whom she herself could adore. His name was John, of course, and it was a foregone conclusion that he should be a stock-broker.

All the same, he was nice, which is something: and she loved him, which is everything.

The little new red-brick Queen Anne villa was as the Garden of Eden to the man and the woman—but the jerry builder is a reptile more cursed than the graceful serpent who, in his handsome suit of green and gold, pulled out the lynch-pin from the wedding chariot of our first parents. The new house—"Cloudesley" its name was—was damp as any cloud, and the Paradise was shattered, not by any romantic serpent-and-apple business, but by plain, honest, every-day rheumatism. It was, indeed, as near rheumatic fever as one may go without tumbling over the grisly fence.

The doctor said "Buxton." John could not leave town. There was a boom or a slump or something that required his personal supervision.

So her old nurse was called up from out of the mists of the grey past before he and she were hers and his, and she went to Buxton in a specially reserved invalid carriage. She went, with