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204 understand pictures, and music gives him no pleasure. He regards art with suspicion, as a somewhat unmanly thing."

"Poor Mr. Travers!"

"Do not pity him, Mary. His life is sufficiently full without it."

"But I've lived to find out that no life can be."

In due course Ernest and Nelly arrived, and, as Sir Walter had prophesied, their pleasure consisted in long motor drives to neighboring places and scenes of interest and beauty. His daughter, in the new light that was glimmering for her, found her father's friends had shrunk a little. She could speak with them and share their interests less whole-heartedly than of old; but they set it down to her tribulation and tried to "rouse" her. Ernest Travers even lamented her new-found interests and hoped they were "only a passing phase."

"She appears to escape from reality into a world of pictures and music," he said. "You must guard against that, my dear Walter. These things can be of no permanent interest to a healthy mind."

For a fortnight they saw much of their friends, and Mary observed how her father expanded in the atmosphere of Ernest and Nelly. They understood each other so well and echoed so many similar sentiments and convictions.

Ernest entertained a poor opinion of the Italian character. He argued that a nation which depended for its prosperity on wines and silk—"and such wines"—must have too much of the