er husband's retirement.) "It _was_ no lie; you're
left neither love nor courtesy. Oh, never mind! say you love me, Sim,
whether it's true or not: that's what it's come to with me."

"Of course I do," said he.

"Of course what?"

"Of course I love you." He smiled, but at heart he grimaced.

"I don't believe you," said she, from custom waiting his protestation.
But the Duke's Chamberlain was in no mood for protestations. He looked
at her high temples, made bald by the twisted papilottes, and wondered
how he could have thought that bold shoulder beautiful.

"I'm in a great hurry, Kate," said he. "Sorry to go, but there's my
horse at the ring to prove the hurry I'm in!"

"I know, I know; you're always in a hurry now with me: it wasn't always
so. Do you hear the brute?" Her husband's squeaky voice querulously
shouting on a servant came to them from behind.

The servant immediately after came to the door with an intimation that
Mr. Petullo desired to know where the spirit-bottle was.

"He knows very well," said Mrs. Petullo. "Here is the key--no, I'll take
it to him myself."

"It's not the drink he wants, but me, the pig," said she as the servant
withdrew. "Kiss me good afternoon, Sim."

"I wish to God it was good-bye!" thought he, as he smacked her vulgarly,
like a clown at a country fair.

She drew her hand across her mouth, and her eyes flashed indignation.

"There's something between us, Simon," said she, in an altered tone; "it
used not to be like that."

"Indeed it did not," he thought bitterly, and not for the first time
he missed something in her--some spirit of simplicity, freshness,
flower-bloom, and purity that he had sought for, seen in many women, and
found elusive, as the frost finds the bloom of flowers he would begem.

Her husband shrieked again, and with mute gestures they parted.

The Chamberlain threw himself upon his horse as 'twere a mortal enemy,
dug rowel-deep in the shuddering flesh, and the hoof-beats thundered on
the causey-stones. The beast whinnied in its pain, reared, and backed to
the breast wall of the bay. He lashed it wildly over the eyes with his
whip, and they galloped up the roadway. A storm of fury possessed him;
he saw nothing, heard nothing.

CHAPTER XIV -- CLAMOUR

Count Victor came through the woods from Strongara singularly disturbed
by the inexplicable sense of familiarity which rose from his meeting
with the horseman. It was a dry day and genial, yet with