Ten minutes later, in the supper-room, Barnes deserted the two ladies with whom he had entered, and went in pursuit of a girl in white, whose necklace of star sapphires, set in a Spanish setting of the seventeenth century, had at once caught the eye of the judicious. Roger, however, knew nothing of jewels, and was only conscious as he approached Miss Floyd, first of the mingling in his own mind of something like embarrassment with something like defiance, and then, of the glitter in the girl's dark eyes.

"I hope you had an interesting debate," he said. "Mrs. Phillips tells me you went to the Senate."

Daphne looked him up and down. "Did I?" she said slowly. "I've forgotten. Will you move, please? There's someone bringing me an ice." And turning her back on Roger, she smiled and beckoned to the Under-Secretary, who with a triumphant face was making his way to her through the crowd.

Roger coloured hotly. "May I bring Mrs. Maddison?" he said, passing her; "she would like to talk to you about a party for next week——"

"Thank you. I am just going home." And with an energetic movement she freed herself from him, and was soon in the gayest of talk with the Under-Secretary.

* * * * *

The reception broke up some time after midnight, and on the way home General Hobson attempted a raid upon his nephew's intentions.

"I don't wish to seem an intrusive person, my dear Roger, but may I ask how much longer you mean to stay in Washington?"

The tone was short and the look which accompanied the words not without sarcasm. Roger, who had been walking beside his companion, still deeply flushed, in complete silence, gave an awkward laugh.

"And as for you, Uncle Archie, I thought you meant to sail a fortnight ago. If you've been staying on like this on my account——"

"Don't make a fool either of me or yourself, Roger!" said the General hastily, roused at last to speech by the annoyance of the situation. "Of course it was on your account that I have stayed on. But what on earth it all means, and where your affairs are—I'm hanged if I have the glimmer of an idea!"

Roger's smile was perfectly good-humoured.

"I haven't much myself," he said quietly.

"Do you—or do you not—mean to propose to Miss Floyd?" cried the General, pausing in the centre of Lafayette Square, now all but deserted, and apostrophizing with his umbrella—for the night was soft and rainy—the presidential statue above his head.

"Have I given you reason to suppose that I was going to do so?" said Roger slowly.

"Given me?—given everybody reason?—of course you have!—a dozen times over. I don't like interfering with your affairs, Roger—with any young man's affairs—but you must know that you have set Washington talking, and it's not fair to a girl—by George it isn't!—when she has given you encouragement and you have made her conspicuous, to begin the same story, in the same place, immediately, with someone else! As you say, I ought to have taken myself off long ago."

"I didn't say anything of the kind," said Roger hotly; "you shouldn't put words into my mouth, Uncle Archie. And I really don't see why you attack me like this. My tutor particularly asked me, if I came across them, to be civil to Mrs. Maddison and her daughter, and I have done nothing but pay them the most ordinary attentions."

"When a man is in love he pays no ordinary attentions. He has eyes for no one but the lady." The General's umbrella, as it descended from the face of Andrew Jackson and rattled on the flagged path, supplied each word with emphasis. "However, it is no good talking, and I don't exactly know why I should put my old oar in. But the fact is I feel a certain responsibility. People here have been uncommonly civil. Well, well!—I've wired to-day to ask if there is a berth left in the Venetia for Saturday. And you, I suppose"—the inquiry was somewhat peremptory—"will be going back to New York?"

"I have no intention of leaving Washington just yet," said Roger, with decision.

"And may I ask what you intend to do here?"

Roger laughed. "I really think that's my business. However, you've been an awful brick, Uncle Archie, to stay on like this. I assure you, if I don't say much, I think it."

By this time they had reached the hotel, the steps and hall of which were full of people.

"That's how you put me off." The General's tone was resentful. "And you won't give me any idea of the line I am to take with your mother?"

The young man smiled again and waved an evasive hand.

"If you'll only be patient a little longer, Uncle Archie——"

At this point an acquaintance of the General's who was smoking in the hall came forward to greet him, and Roger made his escape.

* * * * *

"Well, what the deuce do I mean to do?" Barnes asked himself the question deliberately. He was hanging out of the window, in his bedroom, smoking and pondering.

It was a mild and rainy night. Washington was full of the earth and leaf odours of the spring, which rose in gusts from its trees and gardens; and rugged, swiftly moving clouds disclosed every now and then what looked like hurrying stars.

The young man was excited and on edge. Daphne Floyd—and the thought of Daphne Floyd—had set his pulses hammering; they challenged in him the aggressive, self-assertive, masculine force. The history of the preceding three weeks was far from simple. He had first paid a determined court to her, conducting it in an orthodox, English, conspicuous way. His mother, and her necessities—his own also—imposed it on him; and he flung himself into it, setting his teeth. Then, to his astonishment, one may almost say to his disconcerting, he found the prey all at once, and, as it were, without a struggle, fluttering to his lure, and practically within his grasp. There was an evening when Daphne's sudden softness, the look in her eyes, the inflection in her voice had fairly thrown him off his balance. For the first time he had shown a lack of self-command and self-possession. Whereupon, in a flash, a new and strange Daphne had developed—imperious, difficult, incalculable. The more he gave, the more she claimed. Nor was it mere girlish caprice. The young Englishman, invited to a game that he had never yet played, felt in it something sinister and bewildering. Gropingly, he divined in front of him a future of tyranny on her side, of expected submission on his. The Northern character in him, with its reserve, its phlegm, its general sanity, began to shrink from the Southern elements in her. He became aware of the depths in her nature, of things volcanic and primitive, and the English stuff in him recoiled.

So he was to be bitted and bridled, it seemed, in the future. Daphne Floyd would have bought him with her dollars, and he would have to pay the price.

Something natural and wild in him said No! If he married this girl he would be master, in spite of her money. He realized vaguely, at any rate, the strength of her will, and the way in which it had been tempered and steeled by circumstance. But the perception only roused in himself some slumbering tenacities and vehemences of which he had been scarcely aware. So that, almost immediately—since there was no glamour of passion on his side—he began to resent her small tyrannies, to draw in, and draw back. A few quarrels—not ordinary lovers' quarrels, but representing a true grapple of personalities—sprang up behind a screen of trifles. Daphne was once more rude and provoking, Roger cool and apparently indifferent. This was the stage when Mrs. Verrier had become an admiring observer of what she supposed to be his "tactics." But she knew nothing of the curious little crisis which had preceded them.

Then the Maddisons, mother and daughter, "my tutor's friends," had appeared upon the scene—charming people! Of course civilities were due to them, and had to be paid them. Next to his mother—and to the girl of the orchard—the affections of this youth, who was morally backward and immature, but neither callous nor fundamentally selfish, had been chiefly given to a certain Eton master, of a type happily not uncommon in English public schools. Herbert French had been Roger's earliest and best friend. What Roger had owed him at school, only he knew. Since school-days they had been constant correspondents, and French's influence on his pupil's early manhood had done much, for all Roger's laziness and self-indulgence, to keep him from serious lapses.

Neglect any friends of his—and such jolly friends? Rather not! But as soon as Daphne had seen Elsie Maddison, and he had begged an afternoon to go on an expedition with them, Daphne had become intolerable. She had shown her English friend and his acquaintances a manner so insulting and provocative, that the young man's blood had boiled.

If he were in love with her—well and good! She might no doubt have tamed him by these stripes. But she was no goddess to him; no golden cloud enveloped her; he saw her under a common daylight. At the same time she attracted him; he was vain of what had seemed his conquest, and uneasily exultant in the thought of her immense fortune. "I'll make her an excellent husband if she marries me," he said to himself stubbornly; "I can, and I will."

But meanwhile how was this first stage to end? At the White House that night Daphne had treated him with contumely, and before spectators. He must either go or bring her to the point.

He withdrew suddenly from the window, flinging out the end of his cigarette. "I'll propose to her to-morrow—and she may either take me or leave me!"

He paced up and down his room, conscious of relief and fresh energy. As he did so his eyes were drawn to a letter from Herbert French lying on the table. He took it up and read it again—smiling over it broadly, in a boyish and kindly amusement. "By Jove! he's happy."

Then as he put it down his face darkened. There was something in the letter, in its manliness and humour, its unconscious revelation of ideals wholly independent of dollars, that made Roger for the moment loathe his own position. But he pulled himself together.

"I shall make her a good husband," he repeated, frowning. "She'll have nothing to complain of."

* * * * *

On the following day a picnic among the woods of the Upper Potomac brought together most of the personages in this history. The day was beautiful, the woods fragrant with spring leaf and blossom, and the stream, swollen with rain, ran seaward in a turbid, rejoicing strength.

The General, having secured his passage home, was in good spirits as far as his own affairs were concerned, though still irritable on the score of his nephew's. Since the abortive attempt on his confidence of the night before, Roger had avoided all private conversation with his uncle; and for once the old had to learn patience from the young.

The party was given by the wife of one of the staff of the French Embassy—a young Frenchwoman, as gay and frank as her babies, and possessed, none the less, of all the social arts of her nation. She had taken a shrewd interest in the matter of Daphne Floyd and the Englishman. Daphne, according to her, should be promptly married and her millions taken care of, and the handsome, broad-shouldered fellow impressed the little Frenchwoman's imagination as a proper and capable watchdog. She had indeed become aware that something was wrong, but her acuteness entirely refused to believe that it had any vital connection with the advent of pretty Elsie Maddison. Meanwhile, to please Daphne, whom she liked, while conscious of a strong and frequent desire to smite her, Madame de Fronsac had invited Mrs. Verrier, treating her with a cold and punctilious courtesy that, as applied to any other guest, would have seemed an affront.

In vain, however, did the hostess, in vain did other kindly bystanders, endeavour to play the game of Daphne Floyd. In the first place Daphne herself, though piped unto, refused to dance. She avoided the society of Roger Barnes in a pointed and public way, bright colour on her cheeks and a wild light in her eyes; the Under-Secretary escorted her and carried her wrap. Washington did not know what to think. For owing to this conduct of Daphne's, the charming Boston girl, the other ingenue of the party, fell constantly to the care of young Barnes; and to see them stepping along the green ways together, matched almost in height, and clearly of the same English ancestry and race, pleased while it puzzled the spectators.

The party lunched in a little inn beside the river, and then scattered again along woodland paths. Daphne and the Under-Secretary wandered on ahead and were some distance from the rest of the party when that gentleman suddenly looked at his watch in dismay. An appointment had to be kept with the President at a certain hour, and the Under-Secretary's wits had been wandering. There was nothing for it but to take a short cut through the woods to a local station and make at once for Washington.

Daphne quickened his uneasiness and hastened his departure. She assured him that the others were close behind, and that nothing could suit her better than to rest on a mossy stone that happily presented itself till they arrived.

The Under-Secretary, transformed into the anxious and ambitious politician, abruptly left her.

Daphne, as soon as he was gone, allowed herself the natural attitude that fitted her thoughts. She was furiously in love and torn with jealousy; and that love and jealousy could smart so, and cling so, was a strange revelation to one accustomed to make a world entirely to her liking. Her dark eyes were hollow, her small mouth had lost its colour, and she showed that touch of something wasting and withering that Theocritan shepherds knew in old Sicilian days. It was as though she had defied a god—and the god had avenged himself.

Suddenly he appeared—the teasing divinity—in human shape. There was a rustling among the brushwood fringing the river. Roger Barnes emerged and made his way up towards her.

"I've been stalking you all this time," he said, breathless, as he reached her, "and now at last—I've caught you!"

Daphne rose furiously. "What right have you to stalk me, as you call it—to follow me—to speak to me even? I wish to avoid you—and I have shown it!"

Roger looked at her. He had thrown down his hat, and she saw him against the background of sunny wood, as the magnificent embodiment of its youth and force. "And why have you shown it?" There was a warning tremor of excitement in his voice. "What have I done? I haven't deserved it! You treat me like—like a friend!—and then you drop me like a hot coal. You've been awfully unkind to me!"

"I won't discuss it with you," she cried passionately. "You are in my way, Mr. Barnes. Let me go back to the others!" And stretching out a small hand, she tried to put him aside.

Roger hesitated, but only for a moment. He caught the hand, he gathered its owner into a pair of strong arms, and bending over her, he kissed her. Daphne, suffocated with anger and emotion, broke from him—tottering. Then sinking on the ground beneath a tree, she burst into sobbing. Roger, scarlet, with sparkling eyes, dropped on one knee beside her.



"Daphne, I'm a ruffian! forgive me! you must, Daphne! Look here, I want you to marry me. I've nothing to offer you, of course; I'm a poor man, and you've all this horrible money! But I—I love you!—and I'll make you a good husband, Daphne, that I'll swear. If you'll take me, you shall never be sorry for it."

He looked at her again, sorely embarrassed, hating himself, yet inwardly sure of her. Her small frame shook with weeping. And presently she turned from him and said in a fierce voice:

"Go and tell all that to Elsie Maddison!"

Infinitely relieved, Roger gave a quick, excited laugh.

"She'd soon send me about my business! I should be a day too late for the fair, in that quarter. What do you think she and I have been talking about all this time, Daphne?"

"I don't care," said Daphne hastily, with face still averted.

"I'm going to tell you, all the same," cried Roger triumphantly, and diving into his coat pocket he produced "my tutor's letter." Daphne sat immovable, and he had to read it aloud himself. It contained the rapturous account of Herbert French's engagement to Miss Maddison, a happy event which had taken place in England during the Eton holidays, about a month before this date.

"There!" cried the young man as he finished it. "And she's talked about nothing all the time, nothing at all—but old Herbert—and how good he is—and how good-looking, and the Lord knows what! I got precious sick of it, though I think he's a trump, too. Oh, Daphne!—you were a little fool!"

"All the same, you have behaved abominably!" Daphne said, still choking.

"No, I haven't," was Roger's firm reply. "It was you who were so cross. I couldn't tell you anything. I say! you do know how to stick pins into people!"

But he took up her hand and kissed it as he spoke.

Daphne allowed it. Her breast heaved as the storm departed. And she looked so charming, so soft, so desirable, as she sat there in her white dress, with her great tear-washed eyes and fluttering breath, that the youth was really touched and carried off his feet; and the rest of his task was quite easy. All the familiar things that had to be said were said, and with all the proper emphasis and spirit. He played his part, the spring woods played theirs, and Daphne, worn out by emotion and conquered by passion, gradually betrayed herself wholly. And so much at least may be said to the man's credit that there were certainly moments in the half-hour between them when, amid the rush of talk, laughter, and caresses, that conscience which he owed so greatly to the exertions of "my tutor" pricked him not a little.

After losing themselves deliberately in the woods, they strolled back to join the rest of the party. The sounds of conversation were already audible through the trees in front of them, when they saw Mrs. Verrier coming towards them. She was walking alone and did not perceive them. Her eyes were raised and fixed, as though on some sight in front of them. The bitterness, the anguish, one might almost call it, of her expression, the horror in the eyes, as of one ghost-led, ghost-driven, drew an exclamation from Roger.

"There's Mrs. Verrier! Why, how ill she looks!"

Daphne paused, gazed, and shrank. She drew him aside through the trees.

"Let's go another way. Madeleine's often strange." And with a superstitious pang she wished that Madeleine Verrier's face had not been the first to meet her in this hour of her betrothal.



PART II

THREE YEARS AFTER



CHAPTER V

In the drawing-room at Heston Park two ladies were seated. One was a well-preserved woman of fifty, with a large oblong face, good features, a double chin, and abundant gray hair arranged in waved bandeaux above a forehead which should certainly have implied strength of character, and a pair of challenging black eyes. Lady Barnes moved and spoke with authority; it was evident that she had been accustomed to do so all her life; to trail silk gowns over Persian carpets, to engage expensive cooks and rely on expensive butlers, with a strict attention to small economies all the time; to impose her will on her household and the clergyman of the parish; to give her opinions on books, and expect them to be listened to; to abstain from politics as unfeminine, and to make up for it by the strongest of views on Church questions. She belonged to an English type common throughout all classes—quite harmless and tolerable when things go well, but apt to be soured and twisted by adversity.

And Lady Barnes, it will be remembered, had known adversity. Not much of it, nor for long together; but in her own opinion she had gone through "great trials," to the profit of her Christian character. She was quite certain, now, that everything had been for the best, and that Providence makes no mistakes. But that, perhaps, was because the "trials" had only lasted about a year; and then, so far as they were pecuniary, the marriage of her son with Miss Daphne Floyd had entirely relieved her of them. For Roger now made her a handsome allowance and the chastened habits of a most uncomfortable year had been hastily abandoned.

Nevertheless, Lady Barnes's aspect on this autumn afternoon was not cheerful, and her companion was endeavouring, with a little kind embarrassment, both to soothe an evident irritation and to avoid the confidences that Roger's mother seemed eager to pour out. Elsie French, whom Washington had known three years before as Elsie Maddison, was in that bloom of young married life when all that was lovely in the girl seems to be still lingering, while yet love and motherhood have wrought once more their old transforming miracle on sense and spirit. In her afternoon dress of dainty sprigged silk, with just a touch of austerity in the broad muslin collar and cuffs—her curly brown hair simply parted on her brow, and gathered classically on a shapely head—her mouth a little troubled, her brow a little puckered over Lady Barnes's discontents—she was a very gracious vision. Yet behind the gentleness, as even Lady Barnes knew, there were qualities and characteristics of a singular strength.

Lady Barnes indeed was complaining, and could not be stopped.

"You see, dear Mrs. French," she was saying, in a rapid, lowered voice, and with many glances at the door, "the trouble is that Daphne is never satisfied. She has some impossible ideal in her mind, and then everything must be sacrificed to it. She began with going into ecstasies over this dear old house, and now!—there's scarcely a thing in it she does not want to change. Poor Edward and I spent thousands upon it, and we really flattered ourselves that we had some taste; but it is not good enough for Daphne!"

The speaker settled herself in her chair with a slight but emphatic clatter of bangles and rustle of skirts.

"It's the ceilings, isn't it?" murmured Elsie French, glancing at the heavy decoration, the stucco bosses and pendants above her head which had replaced, some twenty years before, a piece of Adam design, sparing and felicitous.

"It's everything!" Lady Barnes's tone was now more angry than fretful. "I don't, of course, like to say it—but really Daphne's self-confidence is too amazing!"

"She does know so much," said Elsie French reflectively. "Doesn't she?"

"Well, if you call it knowing. She can always get some tiresome person, whom she calls an 'expert,' to back her up. But I believe in liking what you do like, and not being bullied into what you don't like."

"I suppose if one studies these things——" Elsie French began timidly.

"What's the good of studying!" cried Lady Barnes; "one has one's own taste, or one hasn't."

Confronted with this form of the Absolute, Elsie French looked perplexed; especially as her own artistic sympathies were mainly with Daphne. The situation was certainly awkward. At the time of the Barnes's financial crash, and Sir Edward Barnes's death, Heston Park, which belonged to Lady Barnes, was all that remained to her and her son. A park of a hundred acres and a few cottages went with the house; but there was no estate to support it, and it had to be let, to provide an income for the widow and the boy. Much of the expensive furniture had been sold before letting, but enough remained to satisfy the wants of a not very exacting tenant.

Lady Barnes had then departed to weep in exile on a pittance of about seven hundred a year. But with the marriage of her son to Miss Floyd and her millions, the mother's thoughts had turned fondly back to Heston Park. It was too big for her, of course; but the young people clearly must redeem it, and settle there. And Daphne had been quite amenable. The photographs charmed her. The house, she said, was evidently in a pure style, and it would be a delight to make it habitable again. The tenant, however, had a lease, and refused to turn out until at last Daphne had frankly bribed him to go. And now, after three years of married life, during which the young couple had rented various "places," besides their house in London and a villa at Tunis, Heston Park had been vacated, Daphne and Roger had descended upon it as Lady Barnes's tenants at a high rent, intent upon its restoration; and Roger's mother had been invited to their councils.

Hence, indeed, these tears. When Daphne first stepped inside the ancestral mansion of the Trescoes—such had been Lady Barnes's maiden name—she had received a severe shock. The outside, the shell of the house—delightful! But inside!—heavens! what taste, what decoration—what ruin of a beautiful thing! Half the old mantelpieces gone, the ceilings spoiled, the decorations "busy," pretentious, overdone, and nothing left to console her but an ugly row of bad Lelys and worse Highmores—the most despicable collection of family portraits she had ever set eyes upon!

Roger had looked unhappy. "It was father and mother did it," he admitted penitently. "But after all, Daphne, you know they are Trescoes!"—this with a defensive and protecting glance at the Lelys.

Daphne was sorry for it. Her mouth tightened, and certain lines appeared about it which already prophesied what the years would make of the young face. Yet it was a pretty mouth—the mouth, above all, of one with no doubts at all as to her place and rights in the world. Lady Barnes had pronounced it "common" in her secret thoughts before she had known its owner six weeks. But the adjective had never yet escaped the "bulwark of the teeth." Outwardly the mother and daughter-in-law were still on good terms. It was indeed but a week since the son and his wife had arrived—with their baby girl—at Heston Park, after a summer of yachting and fishing in Norway; since Lady Barnes had journeyed thither from London to meet them; and Mr. and Mrs. French had accepted an urgent invitation from Roger, quite sufficiently backed by Daphne, to stay for a few days with Mr. French's old pupil, before the reopening of Eton.

During that time there had been no open quarrels of any kind; but Elsie French was a sensitive creature, and she had been increasingly aware of friction and annoyance behind the scenes. And now here was Lady Barnes let loose! and Daphne might appear at any moment, before she could be re-caged.

"She puts you down so!" cried that lady, making gestures with the paper-knife she had just been employing on the pages of a Mudie book. "If I tell her that something or other—it doesn't matter what—cost at least a great deal of money, she has a way of smiling at you that is positively insulting! She doesn't trouble to argue; she begins to laugh, and raises her eyebrows. I—I always feel as if she had struck me in the face! I know I oughtn't to speak like this; I hadn't meant to do it, especially to a country-woman of hers, as you are."

"Am I?" said Elsie, in a puzzled voice.

Lady Barnes opened her eyes in astonishment.

"I meant"—the explanation was hurried—"I thought—Mrs. Barnes was a South American? Her mother was Spanish, of course; you see it in Daphne."

"Yes; in her wonderful eyes," said Mrs. French warmly; "and her grace—isn't she graceful! My husband says she moves like a sea-wave. She has given her eyes to the child."

"Ah! and other things too, I'm afraid!" cried Lady Barnes, carried away. "But here is the baby."

For the sounds of a childish voice were heard echoing in the domed hall outside. Small feet came pattering, and the drawing-room door was burst open by Roger Barnes, holding a little girl of nearly two and a half by the hand.

Lady Barnes composed herself. It is necessary to smile at children, and she endeavoured to satisfy her own sense of it.

"Come in, Beatty; come and kiss granny!" And Lady Barnes held out her arms.

But the child stood still, surveyed her grandmother with a pair of startling eyes, and then, turning, made a rush for the door. But her father was too quick for her. He closed it with a laugh, and stood with his back to it. The child did not cry, but, with flaming cheeks, she began to beat her father's knees with her small fists.

"Go and kiss granny, darling," said Roger, stroking her dark head.

Beatty turned again, put both her hands behind her, and stood immovable.

"Not kiss granny," she said firmly. "Don't love granny."

"Oh, Beatty"—Mrs. French knelt down beside her—"come and be a good little girl, and I'll show you picture-books."

"I not Beatty—I Jemima Ann," said the small thin voice. "Not be a dood dirl—do upstairs."

She looked at her father again, and then, evidently perceiving that he was not to be moved by force, she changed her tactics. Her delicate, elfish face melted into the sweetest smile; she stood on tiptoe, holding out to him her tiny arms. With a laugh of irrepressible pride and pleasure, Roger stooped to her and lifted her up. She nestled on his shoulder—a small Odalisque, dark, lithe, and tawny, beside her handsome, fair-skinned father. And Roger's manner of holding and caressing her showed the passionate affection with which he regarded her.

He again urged her to kiss her grandmother; but the child again shook her head. "Then," said he craftily, "father must kiss granny." And he began to cross the room.

But Lady Barnes stopped him, not without dignity. "Better not press it, Roger: another time."

Barnes laughed, and yielded. He carried the child away, murmuring to her, "Naughty, naughty 'ittie girl!"—a remark which Beatty, tucked under his ear, and complacently sucking her thumb, received with complete indifference.

"There, you see!" said the grandmother, with slightly flushed cheeks, as the door closed: "the child has been already taught to dislike me, and if Roger had attempted to kiss me, she would probably have struck me."

"Oh, no!" cried Mrs. French. "She is a loving little thing."

"Except when she is jealous," said Lady Barnes, with significance. "I told you she has inherited more than her eyes."

Mrs. French rose. She was determined not to discuss her hostess any more, and she walked over to the bow window as though to look at the prospects of the weather, which had threatened rain. But Roger's mother was not to be repressed. Resentment and antagonism, nurtured on a hundred small incidents and trifling jars, and, to begin with, a matter of temperament, had come at last to speech. And in this charming New Englander, the wife of Roger's best friend, sympathetic, tender, with a touch in her of the nun and the saint, Lady Barnes could not help trying to find a supporter. She was a much weaker person than her square build and her double chin would have led the bystander to suppose; and her feelings had been hurt.

So that when Mrs. French returned to say that the sun seemed to be coming out, her companion, without heeding, went on, with emotion: "It's my son I am thinking of, Mrs. French. I know you're safe, and that Roger depends upon Mr. French more than upon anyone else in the world, so I can't help just saying a word to you about my anxiety. You know, when Roger married, I don't think he was much in love—in fact, I'm sure he wasn't. But now—it's quite different. Roger has a very soft heart, and he's very domestic. He was always the best of sons to me, and as soon as he was married he became the best of husbands. He's devoted to Daphne now, and you see how he adores the child. But the fact is, there's a person in this neighbourhood" (Lady Barnes lowered her voice and looked round her)—"I only knew it for certain this morning—who ... well, who might make trouble. And Daphne's temper is so passionate and uncontrolled that——"

"Dear Lady Barnes, please don't tell me any secrets!" Elsie French implored, and laid a restraining hand on the mother's arm, ready, indeed, to take up her work and fly. But Lady Barnes's chair stood between her and the door, and the occupant of it was substantial.

Laura Barnes hesitated, and in the pause two persons appeared upon the garden path outside, coming towards the open windows of the drawing-room. One was Mrs. Roger Barnes; the other was a man, remarkably tall and slender, with a stoop like that of an overgrown schoolboy, silky dark hair and moustache, and pale gray eyes.

"Dr. Lelius!" said Elsie, in astonishment. "Was Daphne expecting him?"

"Who is Dr. Lelius?" asked Lady Barnes, putting up her eyeglass.

Mrs. French explained that he was a South German art-critic, from Wuerzburg, with a great reputation. She had already met him at Eton and at Oxford.

"Another expert!" said Lady Barnes with a shrug.

The pair passed the window, absorbed apparently in conversation. Mrs. French escaped. Lady Barnes was left to discontent and solitude.

But the solitude was not for long.

When Elsie French descended for tea, an hour later, she was aware, from a considerable distance, of people and tumult in the drawing-room. Daphne's soprano voice—agreeable, but making its mark always, like its owner—could be heard running on. The young mistress of the house seemed to be admonishing, instructing, someone. Could it be her mother-in-law?

When Elsie entered, Daphne was walking up and down in excitement.

"One cannot really live with bad pictures because they happen to be one's ancestors! We won't do them any harm, mamma! of course not. There is a room upstairs where they can be stored—most carefully—and anybody who is interested in them can go and look at them. If they had only been left as they were painted!—not by Lely, of course, but by some drapery man in his studio—passe encore! they might have been just bearable. But you see some wretched restorer went and daubed them all over a few years ago."

"We went to the best man we could find! We took the best advice!" cried Lady Barnes, sitting stiff and crimson in a deep arm-chair, opposite the luckless row of portraits that Daphne was denouncing.

"I'm sure you did. But then, you see, nobody knew anything at all about it in those days. The restorers were all murderers. Ask Dr. Lelius."

Daphne pointed to the stranger, who was leaning against an arm-chair beside her in an embarrassed attitude, as though he were endeavouring to make the chair a buffer between himself and Lady Barnes.

Dr. Lelius bowed.

"It is a modern art," he said with diffidence, and an accent creditably slight—"a quite modern art. We hafe a great man at Wuerzburg."

"I don't suppose he professes to know anything about English pictures, does he?" asked Lady Barnes with scorn.

"Ach!—I do not propose that Mrs. Barnes entrust him wid dese pictures, Madame. It is now too late."

And the willowy German looked, with a half-repressed smile, at the row of pictures—all staring at the bystander with the same saucer eyes, the same wooden arms, and the same brilliance of modern paint and varnish, which not even the passage of four years since it was applied had been able greatly to subdue.

Lady Barnes lifted shoulders and eyes—a woman's angry protest against the tyranny of knowledge.

"All the same, they are my forbears, my kith and kin," she said, with emphasis. "But of course Mrs. Barnes is mistress here: I suppose she will do as she pleases."

The German stared politely at the carpet. It was now Daphne's turn to shrug. She threw herself into a chair, with very red cheeks, one foot hanging over the other, and the fingers of her hands, which shone with diamonds, tapping the chair impatiently. Her dress of a delicate pink, touched here and there with black, her wide black hat, and the eyes which glowed from the small pointed face beneath it; the tumbling masses of her dark hair as contrasted with her general lightness and slenderness; the red of the lips, the whiteness of the hands and brow, the dainty irregularity of feature: these things made a Watteau sketch of her, all pure colour and lissomeness, with dots and scratches of intense black. Daphne was much handsomer than she had been as a girl, but also a trifle less refined. All her points were intensified—her eyes had more flame; the damask of her cheek was deeper; her grace was wilder, her voice a little shriller than of old.

While the uncomfortable silence which the two women had made around them still lasted, Roger Barnes appeared on the garden steps.

"Hullo! any tea going?" He came in, without waiting for an answer, looked from his mother to Daphne, from Daphne to his mother, and laughed uncomfortably.

"Still bothering about those beastly pictures?" he said as he helped himself to a cup of tea.

"Thank you, Roger!" said Lady Barnes.

"I didn't mean any harm, mother." He crossed over to her and sat down beside her. "I say, Daphne, I've got an idea. Why shouldn't mother have them? She's going to take a house, she says. Let's hand them all over to her!"

Lady Barnes's lips trembled with indignation. "The Trescoes who were born and died in this house, belong here!" The tone of the words showed the stab to feeling and self-love. "It would be a sacrilege to move them."

"Well then, let's move ourselves!" exclaimed Daphne, springing up. "We can let this house again, can't we, Roger?"

"We can, I suppose," said Roger, munching his bread and butter; "but we're not going to."

He raised his head and looked quietly at her.

"I think we'd better!" The tone was imperious. Daphne, with her thin arms and hands locked behind her, paused beside her husband.

Dr. Lelius, stealthily raising his eyes, observed the two. A strange little scene—not English at all. The English, he understood, were a phlegmatic people. What had this little Southerner to do among them? And what sort of fellow was the husband?

It was evident that some mute coloquy passed between the husband and wife—disapproval on his part, attempt to assert authority, defiance, on hers. Then the fair-skinned English face, confronting Daphne, wavered and weakened, and Roger smiled into the eyes transfixing him.

"Ah!" thought Lelius, "she has him, de poor fool!"

Roger, coming over to his mother, began a murmured conversation. Daphne, still breathing quick, consented to talk to Dr. Lelius and Mrs. French. Lelius, who travelled widely, had brought her news of some pictures in a chateau of the Bourbonnais—pictures that her whole mind was set on acquiring. Elsie French noticed the expertise of her talk; the intellectual development it implied; the passion of will which accompanied it. "To the dollar, all things are possible"—one might have phrased it so.

The soft September air came in through the open windows, from a garden flooded with western sun. Suddenly through the subdued talk which filled the drawing-room—each group in it avoiding the other—the sound of a motor arriving made itself heard.

"Heavens! who on earth knows we're here?" said Barnes, looking up.

For they had only been camping a week in the house, far too busy to think of neighbours. They sat expectant and annoyed, reproaching each other with not having told the butler to say "Not at home." Lady Barnes's attitude had in it something else—a little anxiety; but it escaped notice. Steps came through the hall, and the butler, throwing open the door, announced—

"Mrs. Fairmile."

Roger Barnes sprang to his feet. His mother, with a little gasp, caught him by the arm instinctively. There was a general rise and a movement of confusion, till the new-comer, advancing, offered her hand to Daphne.

"I am afraid, Mrs. Barnes, I am disturbing you all. The butler told me you had only been here a few days. But Lady Barnes and your husband are such old friends of mine that, as soon as I heard—through our old postmistress, I think—that you had arrived, I thought I might venture."

The charming voice dropped, and the speaker waited, smiling, her eyes fixed on Daphne. Daphne had taken her hand in some bewilderment, and was now looking at her husband for assistance. It was clear to Elsie French, in the background, that Daphne neither knew the lady nor the lady's name, and that the visit had taken her entirely by surprise.

Barnes recovered himself quickly. "I had no idea you were in these parts," he said, as he brought a chair forward for the visitor, and stood beside her a moment.

Lady Barnes, observing him, as she stiffly greeted the new-comer—his cool manner, his deepened colour—felt the usual throb of maternal pride in him, intensified by alarm and excitement.

"Oh, I am staying a day or two with Duchess Mary," said the new-comer. "She is a little older—and no less gouty, poor dear, than she used to be. Mrs. Barnes, I have heard a great deal of you—though you mayn't know anything about me. Ah! Dr. Lelius?"

The German, bowing awkwardly, yet radiant, came forward to take the hand extended to him.

"They did nothing but talk about you at the Louvre, when I was there last week," she said, with a little confidential nod. "You have made them horribly uncomfortable about some of their things. Isn't it a pity to know too much?"

She turned toward Daphne. "I'm afraid that's your case too." She smiled, and the smile lit up a face full of delicate lines and wrinkles, which no effort had been made to disguise; a tired face, where the eyes spoke from caverns of shade, yet with the most appealing and persuasive beauty.

"Do you mean about pictures?" said Daphne, a little coldly. "I don't know as much as Dr. Lelius."

Humour leaped into the eyes fixed upon her; but Mrs. Fairmile only said: "That's not given to the rest of us mortals. But after all, having's better than knowing. Don't—don't you possess the Vitali Signorelli?"

Her voice was most musical and flattering. Daphne smiled in spite of herself. "Yes, we do. It's in London now—waiting till we can find a place for it."

"You must let me make a pilgrimage—when it comes. But you know you'd find a number of things at Upcott—where I'm staying now—that would interest you. I forget whether you've met the Duchess?"

"This is our first week here," said Roger, interposing. "The house has been let till now. We came down to see what could be made of it."

His tone was only just civil. His mother, looking on, said to herself that he was angry—and with good reason.

But Mrs. Fairmile still smiled.

"Ah! the Lelys!" she cried, raising her hand slightly toward the row of portraits on the wall. "The dear impossible things! Are you still discussing them—as we used to do?"

Daphne started. "You know this house, then?"

The smile broadened into a laugh of amusement, as Mrs. Fairmile turned to Roger's mother.

"Don't I, dear Lady Barnes—don't I know this house?"

Lady Barnes seemed to straighten in her chair. "Well, you were here often enough to know it," she said abruptly. "Daphne, Mrs. Fairmile is a distant cousin of ours."

"Distant, but quite enough to swear by!" said the visitor, gaily. "Yes, Mrs. Barnes, I knew this house very well in old days. It has many charming points." She looked round with a face that had suddenly become coolly critical, an embodied intelligence.

Daphne, as though divining for the first time a listener worthy of her steel, began to talk with some rapidity of the changes she wished to make. She talked with an evident desire to show off, to make an impression. Mrs. Fairmile listened attentively, occasionally throwing in a word of criticism or comment, in the softest, gentlest voice. But somehow, whenever she spoke, Daphne felt vaguely irritated. She was generally put slightly in the wrong by her visitor, and Mrs. Fairmile's extraordinary knowledge of Heston Park, and of everything connected with it, was so odd and disconcerting. She had a laughing way, moreover, of appealing to Roger Barnes himself to support a recollection or an opinion, which presently produced a contraction of Daphne's brows. Who was this woman? A cousin—a cousin who knew every inch of the house, and seemed to be one of Roger's closest friends? It was really too strange that in all these years Roger should never have said a word about her!

The red mounted in Daphne's cheek. She began, moreover, to feel herself at a disadvantage to which she was not accustomed. Dr. Lelius, meanwhile, turned to Mrs. Fairmile, whenever she was allowed to speak, with a joyous yet inarticulate deference he had never shown to his hostess. They understood each other at a word or a glance. Beside them Daphne, with all her cleverness, soon appeared as a child for whom one makes allowances.

A vague anger swelled in her throat. She noticed, too, Roger's silence and Lady Barnes's discomfort. There was clearly something here that had been kept from her—something to be unravelled!

Suddenly the new-comer rose. Mrs. Fairmile wore a dress of some pale gray stuff, cobweb-light and transparent, over a green satin. It had the effect of sea-water, and her gray hat, with its pale green wreath, framed the golden-gray of her hair. Every one of her few adornments was exquisite—so was her grace as she moved. Daphne's pink-and-black vivacity beside her seemed a pinchbeck thing.

"Well, now, when will you all come to Upcott?" Mrs. Fairmile said graciously, as she shook hands. "The Duchess will be enchanted to see you any day, and——"

"Thank you! but we really can't come so far," said a determined voice. "We have only a shaky old motor—our new one isn't ready yet—and besides, we want all our time for the house."

"You make him work so hard?"

Mrs. Fairmile, laughing, pointed to the speaker. Roger looked up involuntarily, and Daphne saw the look.

"Roger has nothing to do," she said, quickly. "Thank you very much: we will certainly come. I'll write to you. How many miles did you say it was?"

"Oh, nothing for a motor!—twenty-five. We used to think it nothing for a ride, didn't we?"

The speaker, who was just passing through the door, turned towards Roger, who with Lelius, was escorting her, with a last gesture—gay, yet, like all her gestures, charged with a slight yet deliberate significance.

They disappeared. Daphne walked to the window, biting her lip.

* * * * *

As she stood there Herbert French came into the room, looking a little shy and ill at ease, and behind him three persons, a clergyman in an Archdeacon's apron and gaiters, and two ladies. Daphne, perceiving them sideways in a mirror to her right, could not repress a gesture and muttered sound of annoyance.

French introduced Archdeacon Mountford, his wife and sister. Roger, it seemed, had met them in the hall, and sent them in. He himself had been carried off on some business by the head keeper.

Daphne turned ungraciously. Her colour was very bright, her eyes a little absent and wild. The two ladies, both clad in pale brown stuffs, large mushroom hats, and stout country boots, eyed her nervously, and as they sat down, at her bidding, they left the Archdeacon—who was the vicar of the neighbouring town—to explain, with much amiable stammering, that seeing the Duchess's carriage at the front door, as they were crossing the park, they presumed that visitors were admitted, and had ventured to call.

Daphne received the explanation without any cordiality. She did indeed bid the callers sit down, and ordered some fresh tea. But she took no pains to entertain them, and if Lady Barnes and Herbert French had not come to the rescue, they would have fared but ill. The Archdeacon, in fact, did come to grief. For him Mrs. Barnes was just a "foreigner," imported from some unknown and, of course, inferior milieu, one who had never been "a happy English child," and must therefore be treated with indulgence. He endeavoured to talk to her—kindly—about her country. A branch of his own family, he informed her, had settled about a hundred years before this date in the United States. He gave her, at some length, the genealogy of the branch, then of the main stock to which he himself belonged, presuming that she was, at any rate, acquainted with the name? It was, he said, his strong opinion that American women were very "bright." For himself he could not say that he even disliked the accent, it was so "quaint." Did Mrs. Barnes know many of the American bishops? He himself had met a large number of them at a reception at the Church House, but it had really made him quite uncomfortable! They wore no official dress, and there was he—a mere Archdeacon!—in gaiters. And, of course, no one thought of calling them "my lord." It certainly was very curious—to an Englishman. And Methodist bishops!—such as he was told America possessed in plenty—that was still more curious. One of the Episcopalian bishops, however, had preached—in Westminster Abbey—a remarkable sermon, on a very sad subject, not perhaps a subject to be discussed in a drawing-room—but still——

Suddenly the group on the other side of the room became aware that the Archdeacon's amiable prosing had been sharply interrupted—that Daphne, not he, was holding the field. A gust of talk arose—Daphne declaiming, the Archdeacon, after a first pause of astonishment, changing aspect and tone. French, looking across the room, saw the mask of conventional amiability stripped from what was really a strong and rather tyrannical face. The man's prominent mouth and long upper lip emerged. He drew his chair back from Daphne's; he tried once or twice to stop or argue with her, and finally he rose abruptly.

"My dear!"—his wife turned hastily—"We must not detain Mrs. Barnes longer!"

The two ladies looked at the Archdeacon—the god of their idolatry; then at Daphne. Hurriedly, like birds frightened by a shot, they crossed the room and just touched their hostess's hand; the Archdeacon, making up for their precipitancy by a double dose of dignity, bowed himself out; the door closed behind them.

"Daphne!—my dear! what is the matter?" cried Lady Barnes, in dismay.

"He spoke to me impertinently about my country!" said Daphne, turning upon her, her black eyes blazing, her cheeks white with excitement.

"The Archdeacon!—he is always so polite!"

"He talked like a fool—about things he doesn't understand!" was Daphne's curt reply, as she gathered up her hat and some letters, and moved towards the door.

"About what? My dear Daphne! He could not possibly have meant to offend you! Could he, Mr. French?" Lady Barnes turned plaintively towards her very uncomfortable companions.

Daphne confronted her.

"If he chooses to think America immoral and degraded because American divorce laws are different from the English laws, let him think it!—but he has no business to air his views to an American—at a first visit, too!" said Daphne passionately, and, drawing herself up, she swept out of the room, leaving the others dumfoundered.

"Oh dear! oh dear!" wailed Lady Barnes. "And the Archdeacon is so important! Daphne might have been rude to anybody else—but not the Archdeacon!"

"How did they manage to get into such a subject—so quickly?" asked Elsie in bewilderment.

"I suppose he took it for granted that Daphne agreed with him! All decent people do."

Lady Barnes's wrath was evident—so was her indiscretion. Elsie French applied herself to soothing her, while Herbert French disappeared into the garden with a book. His wife, however, presently observed from the drawing-room that he was not reading. He was pacing the lawn, with his hands behind him, and his eyes on the grass. The slight, slowly-moving figure stood for meditation, and Elsie French knew enough to understand that the incidents of the afternoon might well supply any friend of Roger Barnes's with food for meditation. Herbert had not been in the drawing-room when Mrs. Fairmile was calling, but no doubt he had met her in the hall when she was on her way to her carriage.

Meanwhile Daphne, in her own room, was also employed in meditation. She had thrown herself, frowning, into a chair beside a window which overlooked the park. The landscape had a gentle charm—spreading grass, low hills, and scattered woods—under a warm September sun. But it had no particular accent, and Daphne thought it both tame and depressing; like an English society made up of Archdeacon Mountfords and their women-kind! What a futile, irritating man!—and what dull creatures were the wife and daughter!—mere echoes of their lord and master. She had behaved badly, of course; in a few days she supposed the report of her outburst would be all over the place. She did not care. Even for Roger's sake she was not going to cringe to these poor provincial standards.

And all the time she knew very well that it was not the Archdeacon and his fatuities that were really at fault. The afternoon had been decided not by the Mountfords' call, but by that which had preceded it.



CHAPTER VI

Mrs. Barnes, however, made no immediate reference to the matter which was in truth filling her mind. She avoided her husband and mother-in-law, both of whom were clearly anxious to capture her attention; and, by way of protecting herself from them, she spent the late afternoon in looking through Italian photographs with Dr. Lelius.

But about seven o'clock Roger found her lying on her sofa, her hands clasped behind her head—frowning—the lips working.

He came in rather consciously, glancing at his wife in hesitation.

"Are you tired, Daphne?"

"No."

"A penny for your thoughts, then!" He stooped over her and looked into her eyes.

Daphne made no reply. She continued to look straight before her.

"What's the matter with you?" he said, at last.

"I'm wondering," said Daphne slowly, "how many more cousins and great friends you have, that I know nothing about. I think another time it would be civil—just that!—to give me a word of warning."

Roger pulled at his moustache. "I hadn't an idea she was within a thousand miles of this place! But, if I had, I couldn't have imagined she would have the face to come here!"

"Who is she?" With a sudden movement Daphne turned her eyes upon him.

"Well, there's no good making any bones about it," said the man, flushing. "She's a girl I was once engaged to, for a very short time," he added hastily. "It was the week before my father died, and our smash came. As soon as it came she threw me over."

Daphne's intense gaze, under the slightly frowning brows, disquieted him.

"How long were you engaged to her?"

"Three weeks."

"Had she been staying here before that?"

"Yes—she often stayed here. Daphne! don't look like that! She treated me abominably; and before I married you I had come not to care twopence about her."

"You did care about her when you proposed to me?"

"No!—not at all! Of course, when I went out to New York I was sore, because she had thrown me over."

"And I"—Daphne made a scornful lip—"was the feather-bed to catch you as you fell. It never occurred to you that it might have been honourable to tell me?"

"Well, I don't know—I never asked you to tell me of your affairs!"

Roger, his hands in his pockets, looked round at her with an awkward laugh.

"I told you everything!" was the quick reply—"everything."

Roger uncomfortably remembered that so indeed it had been; and moreover that he had been a good deal bored at the time by Daphne's confessions.

He had not been enough in love with her—then—to find them of any great account. And certainly it had never occurred to him to pay them back in kind. What did it matter to her or to anyone that Chloe Morant had made a fool of him? His recollection of the fooling, at the time he proposed to Daphne, was still so poignant that it would have been impossible to speak of it. And within a few months afterwards he had practically forgotten it—and Chloe too. Of course he could not see her again, for the first time, without being "a bit upset"; mostly, indeed, by the boldness—the brazenness—of her behaviour. But his emotions were of no tragic strength, and, as Lady Barnes had complained to Mrs. French, he was now honestly in love with Daphne and his child.

So that he had nothing but impatience and annoyance for the recollection of the visit of the afternoon; and Daphne's attitude distressed him. Why, she was as pale as a ghost! His thoughts sent Chloe Fairmile to the deuce.

"Look here, dear!" he said, kneeling down suddenly beside his wife—"don't you get any nonsense into your head. I'm not the kind of fellow who goes philandering after a woman when she's jilted him. I took her measure, and after you accepted me I never gave her another thought. I forgot her, dear—bag and baggage! Kiss me, Daphne!"

But Daphne still held him at bay.

"How long were you engaged to her?" she repeated.

"I've told you—three weeks!" said the man, reluctantly.

"How long had you known her?"

"A year or two. She was a distant cousin of father's. Her father was Governor of Madras, and her mother was dead. She couldn't stand India for long together, and she used to stay about with relations. Why she took a fancy to me I can't imagine. She's so booky and artistic, and that kind of thing, that I never understood half the time what she was talking about. Now you're just as clever, you know, darling, but I do understand you."

Roger's conscience made a few dim remonstrances. It asked him whether in fact, standing on his own qualifications and advantages of quite a different kind, he had not always felt himself triumphantly more than a match for Chloe and her cleverness. But he paid no heed to them. He was engaged in stroking Daphne's fingers and studying the small set face.

"Whom did she marry?" asked Daphne, putting an end to the stroking.

"A fellow in the army—Major Fairmile—a smart, popular sort of chap. He was her father's aide-de-camp when they married—just after we did—and they've been in India, or Egypt, ever since. They don't get on, and I suppose she comes and quarters herself on the old Duchess—as she used to on us."

"You seem to know all about her! Yes, I remember now, I've heard people speak of her to you. Mrs. Fairmile—Mrs. Fairmile—yes, I remember," said Daphne, in a brooding voice, her cheeks becoming suddenly very red. "Your uncle—in town—mentioned her. I didn't take any notice."

"Why should you? She doesn't matter a fig, either to you or to me!"

"It matters to me very much that these people who spoke of her—your uncle and the others—knew what I didn't know!" cried Daphne, passionately. She stared at Roger, strangely conscious that something epoch-making and decisive had happened. Roger had had a secret from her all these years—that was what had happened; and now she had discovered it. That he could have a secret from her, however, was the real discovery. She felt a fierce resentment, and yet a kind of added respect for him. All the time he had been the private owner of thoughts and recollections that she had no part in, and the fact roused in her tumult and bitterness. Nevertheless the disturbance which it produced in her sense of property, the shock and anguish of it, brought back something of the passion of love she had felt in the first year of their marriage.

During these three years she had more than once shown herself insanely jealous for the merest trifles. But Roger had always laughed at her, and she had ended by laughing at herself.

Yet all the time he had had this secret. She sat looking at him hard with her astonishing eyes; and he grew more and more uneasy.

"Well, some of them knew," he said, answering her last reproach. "And they knew that I was jolly well quit of her! I suppose I ought to have told you, Daphne—of course I ought—I'm sorry. But the fact was I never wanted to think of her again. And I certainly never want to see her again! Why, in the name of goodness, did you accept that tea-fight?"

"Because I mean to go."

"Then you'll have to go without me," was the incautious reply.

"Oh, so you're afraid of meeting her! I shall know what to think, if you don't go." Daphne sat erect, her hands clasped round her knees.

Roger made a sound of wrath, and threw his cigarette into the fire. Then, turning round again to face her, he tried to control himself.

"Look here, Daphne, don't let us quarrel about this. I'll tell you everything you want to know—the whole beastly story. But it can't be pleasant to me to meet a woman who treated me as she did—and it oughtn't to be pleasant to you either. It was like her audacity to come this afternoon."

"She simply wants to get hold of you again!" Daphne sprang up as she spoke with a violent movement, her face blazing.

"Nonsense! she came out of nothing in the world but curiosity, and because she likes making people uncomfortable. She knew very well mother and I didn't want her!"

But the more he tried to persuade her the more determined was Daphne to pay the promised visit, and that he should pay it with her. He gave way at last, and she allowed herself to be soothed and caressed. Then, when she seemed to have recovered herself, he gave her a tragic-comic account of the three weeks' engagement, and the manner in which it had been broken off: caustic enough, one might have thought, to satisfy the most unfriendly listener. Daphne heard it all quietly.

Then her maid came, and she donned a tea-gown.

When Roger returned, after dressing, he found her still abstracted.

"I suppose you kissed her?" she said abruptly, as they stood by the fire together.

He broke out in laughter and annoyance, and called her a little goose, with his arm round her.

But she persisted. "You did kiss her?"

"Well, of course I did! What else is one engaged for?"

"I'm certain she wished for a great deal of kissing!" said Daphne, quickly.

Roger was silent. Suddenly there swept through him the memory of the scene in the orchard, and with it an admission—wrung, as it were, from a wholly unwilling self—that it had remained for him a scene unique and unapproached. In that one hour the "muddy vesture" of common feeling and desire that closed in his manhood had taken fire and burnt to a pure flame, fusing, so it seemed, body and soul. He had not thought of it for years, but now that he was made to think of it, the old thrill returned—a memory of something heavenly, ecstatic, far transcending the common hours and the common earth.

The next moment he had thrown the recollection angrily from him. Stooping to his wife, he kissed her warmly. "Look here, Daphne! I wish you'd let that woman alone! Have I ever looked at anyone but you, old girl, since that day at Mount Vernon?"

Daphne let him hold her close: but all the time, thoughts—ugly thoughts—like "little mice stole in and out." The notion of Roger and that woman, in the past, engaged—always together, in each other's arms, tormented her unendurably.

* * * * *

She did not, however, say a word to Lady Barnes on the subject. The morning following Mrs. Fairmile's visit that lady began a rather awkward explanation of Chloe Fairmile's place in the family history, and of the reasons for Roger's silence and her own. Daphne took it apparently with complete indifference, and managed to cut it short in the middle.

Nevertheless she brooded over the whole business; and her resentment showed itself, first of all, in a more and more drastic treatment of Heston, its pictures, decorations and appointments. Lady Barnes dared not oppose her any more. She understood that if she were thwarted, or even criticized, Daphne would simply decline to live there, and her own link with the place would be once more broken. So she withdrew angrily from the scene, and tried not to know what was going on. Meanwhile a note of invitation had been addressed to Daphne by the Duchess, and had been accepted; Roger had been reminded, at the point of the bayonet, that go he must; and Dr. Lelius had transferred himself from Heston to Upcott, and the companionship of Mrs. Fairmile.

* * * * *

It was the last day of the Frenches' visit. Roger and Herbert French had been trying to get a brace or two of partridges on the long-neglected and much-poached estate; and on the way home French expressed a hope that, now they were to settle at Heston, Roger would take up some of the usual duties of the country gentleman. He spoke in the half-jesting way characteristic of the modern Mentor. The old didactics have long gone out of fashion, and the moralist of to-day, instead of preaching, ore retundo, must only "hint a fault and hesitate dislike." But, hide it as he might, there was an ethical and religious passion in French that would out, and was soon indeed to drive him from Eton to a town parish. He had been ordained some two years before this date.

It was this inborn pastoral gift, just as real as the literary or artistic gifts, and containing the same potentialities of genius as they which was leading him to feel a deep anxiety about the Barnes's menage. It seemed to him necessary that Daphne should respect her husband; and Roger, in a state of complete idleness, was not altogether respectable.

So, with much quizzing of him as "the Squire," French tried to goad his companion into some of a Squire's duties. "Stand for the County Council, old fellow," he said. "Your father was on it, and it'll give you something to do."

To his surprise Roger at once acquiesced. He was striding along in cap and knickerbockers, his curly hair still thick and golden on his temples, his clear skin flushed with exercise, his general physical aspect even more splendid than it had been in his first youth. Beside him, the slender figure and pleasant irregular face of Herbert French would have been altogether effaced and eclipsed but for the Eton master's two striking points: prematurely white hair, remarkably thick and abundant; and very blue eyes, shy, spiritual and charming.

"I don't mind," Roger was saying, "if you think they'd have me. Beastly bore, of course! But one's got to do something for one's keep."

He looked round with a smile, slightly conscious. The position he had occupied for some three years, of the idle and penniless husband dependent on his wife's dollars, was not, he knew, an exalted one in French's eyes.

"Oh! you'll find it quite tolerable," said French. "Roads and schools do as well as anything else to break one's teeth on. We shall see you a magistrate directly."

Roger laughed. "That would be a good one!—I say, you know, I hope Daphne's going to like Heston."

French hoped so too, guardedly.

"I hear the Archdeacon got on her nerves yesterday?"

He looked at his companion with a slight laugh and a shrug.

"That doesn't matter."

"I don't know. He's rather a spiteful old party. And Daphne's accustomed to be made a lot of, you know. In London there's always a heap of people making up to her—and in Paris, too. She talks uncommon good French—learnt it in the convent. I don't understand a word of what they talk about—but she's a queen—I can tell you! She doesn't want Archdeacons prating at her."

"It'll be all right when she knows the people."

"Of course, mother and I get along here all right. We've got to pick up the threads again; but we do know all the people, and we like the old place for grandfather's sake, and all the rest of it. But there isn't much to amuse Daphne here."

"She'll be doing up the house."

"And offending mother all the time. I say, French, don't you think art's an awful nuisance! When I hear Lelius yarning on about quattro-cento and cinque-cento, I could drown myself. No! I suppose you're tarred with the same brush." Roger shrugged his shoulders. "Well, I don't care, so long as Daphne gets what she wants, and the place suits the child." His ruddy countenance took a shade of anxiety.

French inquired what reason there was to suppose that Beatty would not thrive perfectly at Heston. Roger could only say that the child had seemed to flag a little since their arrival. Appetite not quite so good, temper difficult, and so on. Their smart lady-nurse was not quite satisfied. "And I've been finding out about doctors here," the young father went on, knitting his brows: "blokes, most of them, and such old blokes! I wouldn't trust Beatty to one of them. But I've heard of a new man at Hereford—awfully good, they say—a wunner! And after all a motor would soon run him out!"

He went on talking eagerly about the child, her beauty, her cleverness, the plans Daphne had for her bringing up, and so on. No other child ever had been, ever could be, so fetching, so "cunning," so lovely, such a duck! The Frenches, indeed, possessed a boy of two, reputed handsome. Roger wished to show himself indulgent to anything that might be pleaded for him. "Dear little fellow!"—of course. But Beatty! Well! it was surprising, indeed, that he should find himself the father of such a little miracle; he didn't know what he'd done to deserve it. Herbert French smiled as he walked.

"Of course, I hope there'll be a boy," said Roger, stopping suddenly to look at Heston Park, half a mile off, emerging from the trees. "Daphne would like a boy—so should I, and particularly now that we've got the old house back again."

He stood and surveyed it. French noticed in the growing manliness of his face and bearing the signs of things and forces ancestral, of those ghostly hands stretching from the past that in a long settled society tend to push a man into his right place and keep him there. The Barnes family was tolerable, though not distinguished. Roger's father's great temporary success in politics and business had given it a passing splendour, now quenched in the tides of failure and disaster which had finally overwhelmed his career. Roger evidently did not want to think much about his Barnes heritage. But it was clear also that he was proud of the Trescoes; that he had fallen back upon them, so to speak. Since the fifteenth century there had always been a Trescoe at Heston; and Roger had already taken to browsing in county histories and sorting family letters. French foresaw a double-barrelled surname before long—perhaps, just in time for the advent of the future son and heir who was already a personage in the mind, if not yet positively expected.

"My dear fellow, I hope Mrs. Barnes will give you not one son, but many!" he said, in answer to his companion's outburst. "They're wanted nowadays."

Roger nodded and smiled, and then passed on to discussion of county business and county people. He had already, it seemed, informed himself to a rather surprising degree. The shrewd, upright county gentleman was beginning to emerge, oddly, from the Apollo. The merits and absurdities of the type were already there, indeed, in posse. How persistent was the type, and the instinct! A man of Roger's antecedents might seem to swerve from the course; but the smallest favourable variation of circumstances, and there he was again on the track, trotting happily between the shafts.

"If only the wife plays up!" thought French.

The recollection of Daphne, indeed, emerged simultaneously in both minds.

"Daphne, you know, won't be able to stand this all the year round," said Roger. "By George, no! not with a wagon-load of Leliuses!" Then, with a sudden veer and a flush: "I say, French, do you know what sort of state the Fairmile marriage is in by now? I think that lady might have spared her call—don't you?"

French kept his eyes on the path. It was the first time, as far as he was concerned, that Roger had referred to the incident. Yet the tone of the questioner implied a past history. It was to him, indeed, that Roger had come, in the first bitterness of his young grief and anger, after the "jilting." French had tried to help him, only to find that he was no more a match for the lady than the rest of the world.

As to the call and the invitation, he agreed heartily that a person of delicacy would have omitted them. The Fairmile marriage, it was generally rumoured, had broken down hopelessly.

"Faults on both sides, of course. Fairmile is and always was an unscrupulous beggar! He left Eton just as you came, but I remember him well."

Roger began a sentence to the effect that if Fairmile had no scruples of his own, Chloe would scarcely have taught him any; but he checked himself abruptly in the middle, and the two men passed to other topics. French began to talk of East London, and the parish he was to have there. Roger, indifferent at first, did not remain so. He did not profess, indeed, any enthusiasm of humanity; but French found in him new curiosities. That children should starve, and slave, and suffer—that moved him. He was, at any rate, for hanging the parents.

* * * * *

The day of the Upcott visit came, and, in spite of all recalcitrance, Roger was made to mount the motor beside his wife. Lady Barnes had entirely refused to go, and Mr. and Mrs. French had departed that morning for Eton.

As the thing was inevitable, Roger's male philosophy came to his aid. Better laugh and have done with it. So that, as he and Daphne sped along the autumn lanes, he talked about anything and everything. He expressed, for instance, his friendly admiration for Elsie French.

"She's just the wife for old Herbert—and, by George, she's in love with him!"

"A great deal too much in love with him!" said Daphne, sharply. The day was chilly, with a strong east wind blowing, and Daphne's small figure and face were enveloped in a marvellous wrap, compounded in equal proportions of Russian sables and white cloth. It had not long arrived from Woerth, and Roger had allowed himself some jibes as to its probable cost. Daphne's "simplicity," the pose of her girlhood, was in fact breaking down in all directions. The arrogant spending instinct had gained upon the moderating and self-restraining instinct. The results often made Barnes uncomfortable. But he was inarticulate, and easily intimidated—by Daphne. With regard to Mrs. French, however, he took up the cudgels at once. Why shouldn't Elsie adore her man, if it pleased her? Old Herbert was worth it.

Women, said Daphne, should never put themselves wholly in a man's power. Moreover, wifely adoration was particularly bad for clergymen, who were far too much inclined already to give themselves airs.

"I say! Herbert never gives himself airs!"

"They both did—to me. They have quite different ways from us, and they make one feel it. They have family prayers—we don't. They have ascetic ideas about bringing up children—I haven't. Elsie would think it self-indulgent and abominable to stay in bed to breakfast—I don't. The fact is, all her interests and ideals are quite different from mine, and I am rather tired of being made to feel inferior."

"Daphne! what rubbish! I'm certain Elsie French never had such an idea in her head. She's awfully soft and nice; I never saw a bit of conceit in her."

"She's soft outside and steel inside. Well, never mind! we don't get on. She's the old America, I'm the new," said Daphne, half frowning, half laughing; "and I'm as good as she."

"You're a very good-looking woman, anyway," said Roger, admiring the vision of her among the warm browns and shining whites of her wrap. "Much better-looking than when I married you." He slipped an arm under the cloak and gave her small waist a squeeze.

Daphne turned her eyes upon him. In their black depths his touch had roused a passion which was by no means all tenderness. There was in it something threatening, something intensely and inordinately possessive. "That means that you didn't think me good-looking at all, as compared with—Chloe?" she said insistently.

"Really, Daphne!"—Roger withdrew his arm with a rather angry laugh—"the way you twist what one says! I declare I won't make you any more pretty speeches for an age."

Daphne scarcely replied; but there dawned on her face the smile—melting, provocative, intent—which is the natural weapon of such a temperament. With a quick movement she nestled to her husband's side, and Roger was soon appeased.

* * * * *

The visit which followed always counted in Roger Barnes's memory as the first act of the tragedy, the first onset of the evil that engulfed him.

They found the old Duchess, Mrs. Fairmile, and Dr. Lelius, alone. The Duchess had been the penniless daughter of an Irish clergyman, married en secondes noces for her somewhat queer and stimulating personality, by an epicurean duke, who, after having provided the family with a sufficient store of dull children by an aristocratic mother, thought himself at liberty, in his declining years, to please himself. He had left her the dower-house—small but delicately Jacobean—and she was now nearly as old as the Duke had been when he married her. She was largely made, shapeless, and untidy. Her mannish face and head were tied up in a kind of lace coif; she had long since abandoned all thought of a waist; and her strong chin rested on an ample bosom.

As soon as Mrs. Barnes was seated near her hostess, Lelius—who had an intimate acquaintance, through their pictures, with half the great people of Europe—began to observe the Duchess's impressions. Amused curiosity, first. Evidently Daphne represented to her one of the queer, crude types that modern society is always throwing up on the shores of life—like strange beasts from deep-sea soundings.

An American heiress, half Spanish—South-American Spanish—with no doubt a dash of Indian; no manners, as Europe understands them; unlimited money, and absurd pretensions—so Chloe said—in the matter of art; a mixture of the pedant and the parvenue; where on earth had young Barnes picked her up! It was in some such way, no doubt—so Lelius guessed—that the Duchess's thoughts were running.

Meanwhile Mrs. Barnes was treated with all possible civility. The Duchess inquired into the plans for rebuilding Heston; talked of her own recollections of the place, and its owners; hoped that Mrs. Barnes was pleased with the neighbourhood; and finally asked the stock question, "And how do you like England?"

Daphne looked at her coolly. "Moderately!" she said, with a smile, the colour rising in her cheek as she became aware, without looking at them, that Roger and Mrs. Fairmile had adjourned to the farther end of the large room, leaving her to the Duchess and Lelius.

The small eyes above the Duchess's prominent nose sparkled. "Only moderately?" The speaker's tone expressed that she had been for once taken by surprise. "I'm extremely sorry we don't please you, Mrs. Barnes."

"You see, my expectations were so high."

"Is it the country, or the climate, or the people, that won't do?" inquired the Duchess, amused.

"I suppose it would be civil to say the climate," replied Daphne, laughing.

Whereupon the Duchess saw that her visitor had made up her mind not to be overawed. The great lady summoned Dr. Lelius to her aid, and she, the German, and Daphne, kept up a sparring conversation, in which Mrs. Barnes, driven on by a secret wrath, showed herself rather noisier than Englishwomen generally are. She was a little impertinent, the Duchess thought, decidedly aggressive, and not witty enough to carry it off.

Meanwhile, Daphne had instantly perceived that Mrs. Fairmile and Roger had disappeared into the conservatory; and though she talked incessantly through their absence, she felt each minute of it. When they came back for tea, she imagined that Roger looked embarrassed, while Mrs. Fairmile was all gaiety, chatting to her companion, her face raised to his, in the manner of one joyously renewing an old intimacy. As they slowly advanced up the long room, Daphne felt it almost intolerable to watch them, and her pulses began to race. Why had she never been told of this thing? That was what rankled; and the Southern wildness in her blood sent visions of the past and terrors of the future hurrying through her brain, even while she went on talking fast and recklessly to the Duchess.

* * * * *

At tea-time conversation turned on the various beautiful things which the room contained—its Nattiers, its Gobelins, its two dessus de portes by Boucher, and its two cabinets, of which one had belonged to Beaumarchais and the other to the Appartement du Dauphin at Versailles.

Daphne restrained herself for a time, asked questions, and affected no special knowledge. Then, at a pause, she lifted a careless hand, inquiring whether "the Fragonard sketch" opposite were not the pendant of one—she named it—at Berlin.

"Ah-h-h!" said Mrs. Fairmile, with a smiling shake of the head, "how clever of you! But that's not a Fragonard. I wish it were. It's an unknown. Dr. Lelius has given him a name."

And she and Lelius fell into a discussion of the drawing, that soon left Daphne behind. Native taste of the finest, mingled with the training of a lifetime, the intimate knowledge of collections of one who had lived among them from her childhood—these things had long since given Chloe Fairmile a kind of European reputation. Daphne stumbled after her, consumed with angry envy, the precieuse in her resenting the easy mastery of Mrs. Fairmile, and the wife in her offended by the strange beauty, the soft audacities of a woman who had once, it seemed, held Roger captive, and would, of course, like to hold him captive again.

She burned in some way to assert herself, the imperious will chafing at the slender barrier of self-control. And some malicious god did, in fact, send an opportunity.

After tea, when Roger, in spite of efforts to confine himself to the Duchess, had been once more drawn into the orbit of Mrs. Fairmile, as she sat fingering a cigarette between the two men, and gossiping of people and politics, the butler entered, and whispered a message to the Duchess.

The mistress of the house laughed. "Chloe! who do you think has called? Old Marcus, of South Audley Street. He's been at Brendon House—buying up their Romneys, I should think. And as he was passing here, he wished to show me something. Shall we have him in?"

"By all means! The last time he was here he offered you four thousand pounds for the blue Nattier," said Chloe, with a smile, pointing to the picture.

The Duchess gave orders; and an elderly man, with long black hair, swarthy complexion, fine eyes, and a peaked forehead, was admitted, and greeted by her, Mrs. Fairmile, and Dr. Lelius as an old acquaintance. He sat down beside them, was given tea, and presented to Mr. and Mrs. Barnes. Daphne, who knew the famous dealer by sight and reputation perfectly well, was piqued that he did not recognize her. Yet she well remembered having given him an important commission not more than a year before her marriage.

As soon as a cup of tea had been dispatched, Marcus came to the business. He drew a small leather case out of the bag he had brought into the room with him; and the case, being opened, disclosed a small but marvellous piece of Sevres.

"There!" he said, pointing triumphantly to a piece on the Duchess's chimney-piece. "Your Grace asked me—oh! ten years ago—and again last year—to find you the pair of that. Now—you have it!"

He put the two together, and the effect was great. The Duchess looked at it with greed—the greed of the connoisseur. But she shook her head.

"Marcus, I have no money."

"Oh!" He protested, smiling and shrugging his shoulders.

"And I know you want a brigand's price for it."

"Oh, nothing—nothing at all."

The Duchess took it up, and regretfully turned it round and round.

"A thousand, Marcus?" she said, looking up.

He laughed, and would not reply.

"That means more, Marcus: how do you imagine that an old woman like me, with only just enough for bread and butter, can waste her money on Sevres?" He grinned. She put it down resolutely. "No! I've got a consumptive nephew with a consumptive family. He ought to have been hung for marrying, but I've got to send them all to Davos this winter. No, I can't, Marcus; I can't—I'm too poor." But her eyes caressed the shining thing.

Daphne bent forward. "If the Duchess has really made up her mind, Mr. Marcus, I will take it. It would just suit me!"

Marcus started on his chair. "Pardon, Madame!" he said, turning hastily to look at the slender lady in white, of whom he had as yet taken no notice.

"We have the motor. We can take it with us," said Daphne, stretching out her hand for it triumphantly.

"Madame," said Marcus, in some agitation, "I have not the honour. The price——"

"The price doesn't matter," said Daphne, smiling. "You know me quite well, Mr. Marcus. Do you remember selling a Louis Seize cabinet to Miss Floyd?"

"Ah!" The dealer was on his feet in a moment, saluting, excusing himself. Daphne heard him with graciousness. She was now the centre of the situation: she had asserted herself, and her money. Marcus outdid himself in homage. Lelius in the background looked on, a sarcastic smile hidden by his fair moustache. Mrs. Fairmile, too, smiled; Roger had grown rather hot; and the Duchess was frankly annoyed.

"I surrender it to force majeure," she said, as Daphne took it from her. "Why are we not all Americans?"

And then, leaning back in her chair, she would talk no more. The pleasure of the visit, so far as it had ever existed, was at an end.

* * * * *

But before the Barnes motor departed homewards, Mrs. Fairmile had again found means to carry Roger Barnes out of sight and hearing into the garden. Roger had not been able to avoid it; and Daphne, hugging the leather case, had, all the same, to look on.

When they were once more alone together, speeding through the bright sunset air, each found the other on edge.

"You were rather rough on the Duchess, Daphne!" Roger protested. "It wasn't quite nice, was it, outbidding her like that in her own house?"

Daphne flared up at once, declaring that she wanted no lessons in deportment from him or anyone else, and then demanding fiercely what was the meaning of his two disappearances with Mrs. Fairmile. Whereupon Roger lost his temper still more decidedly, refusing to give any account of himself, and the drive passed in a continuous quarrel, which only just stopped short, on Daphne's side, of those outrageous and insulting things which were burning at the back of her tongue, while she could not as yet bring herself to say them.

An unsatisfactory peace was patched up during the evening. But in the dead of night Daphne sat up in bed, looking at the face and head of her husband beside her on the pillow. He lay peacefully sleeping, the noble outline of brow and features still nobler in the dim light which effaced all the weaker, emptier touches. Daphne felt rising within her that mingled passion of the jealous woman, which is half love, half hate, of which she had felt the first stirrings in her early jealousy of Elsie Maddison. It was the clutch of something racial and inherited—a something which the Northerner hardly knows. She had felt it before on one or two occasions, but not with this intensity. The grace of Chloe Fairmile haunted her memory, and the perfection, the corrupt perfection of her appeal to men, men like Roger.



She must wring from him—she must and would—a much fuller history of his engagement. And of those conversations in the garden, too. It stung her to recollect that, after all, he had given her no account of them. She had been sure they had not been ordinary conversations!—Mrs. Fairmile was not the person to waste her time in chit-chat.

A gust of violence swept through her. She had given Roger everything—money, ease, amusement. Where would he have been without her? And his mother, too?—tiresome, obstructive woman! For the first time that veil of the unspoken, that mist of loving illusion which preserves all human relations, broke down between Daphne and her marriage. Her thoughts dwelt, in a vulgar detail, on the money she had settled upon Roger—on his tendencies to extravagance—his happy-go-lucky self-confident ways. He would have been a pauper but for her; but now that he had her money safe, without a word to her of his previous engagement, he and Mrs. Fairmile might do as they pleased. The heat and corrosion of this idea spread through her being, and the will made no fight against it.



CHAPTER VII

"You're off to the meet?"

"I am. Look at the day!"

Chloe Fairmile, who was standing in her riding-habit at the window of the Duchess's morning-room, turned to greet her hostess.

A mild November sun shone on the garden and the woods, and Chloe's face—the more exquisite as a rule for its slight, strange withering—had caught a freshness from the morning.

The Duchess was embraced, and bore it; she herself never kissed anybody.

"You always look well, my dear, in a habit, and you know it. Tell me what I shall do with this invitation."

"From Lady Warton? May I look?"

Chloe took a much blotted and crossed letter from the Duchess's hand.

"What were her governesses about?" said the Duchess, pointing to it. "Really—the education of our class! Read it!"

... "Can I persuade you to come—and bring Mrs. Fairmile—next Tuesday to dinner, to meet Roger Barnes and his wife? I groan at the thought, for I think she is quite one of the most disagreeable little creatures I ever saw. But Warton says I must—a Lord-Lieutenant can't pick and choose!—and people as rich as they are have to be considered. I can't imagine why it is she makes herself so odious. All the Americans I ever knew I have liked particularly. It is, of course, annoying that they have so much money—but Warton says it isn't their fault—it's Protection, or something of the kind. But Mrs. Barnes seems really to wish to trample on us. She told Warton the other day that his tapestries—you know, those we're so proud of—that they were bad Flemish copies of something or other—a set belonging to a horrid friend of hers, I think. Warton was furious. And she's made the people at Brendon love her for ever by insisting that they have now ruined all their pictures without exception, by the way they've had them restored—et cetera, et cetera. She really makes us feel her millions—and her brains—too much. We're paupers, but we're not worms. Then there's the Archdeacon—why should she fall foul of him? He tells Warton that her principles are really shocking. She told him she saw no reason why people should stick to their husbands or wives longer than it pleased them—and that in America nobody did! He doesn't wish Mrs. Mountford to see much of her;—though, really, my dear, I don't think Mrs. M. is likely to give him trouble—do you? And I hear, of course, that she thinks us all dull and stuck-up, and as ignorant as savages. It's so odd she shouldn't even want to be liked!—a young woman in a strange neighbourhood. But she evidently doesn't, a bit. Warton declares she's already tired of Roger—and she's certainly not nice to him. What can be the matter? Anyway, dear Duchess, do come, and help us through."

"What, indeed, can be the matter?" repeated Chloe lightly, as she handed back the letter.

"Angela Warton never knows anything. But there's not much need for you to ask, my dear," said the Duchess quietly.

Mrs. Fairmile turned an astonished face.

"Me?"

The Duchess, more bulky, shapeless and swathed than usual, subsided on a chair, and just raised her small but sharp eyes on Mrs. Fairmile.

"What can you mean?" said Chloe, after a moment, in her gayest voice. "I can't imagine. And I don't think I'll try."

She stooped and kissed the untidy lady in the chair. The Duchess bore it again, but the lines of her mouth, with the strong droop at the corners, became a trifle grim. Chloe looked at her, smiled, shook her head. The Duchess shook hers, and then they both began to talk of an engagement announced that morning in the Times.