uld have married Elfrida Bell--
what an idyll they would make of life together!--and she,
Janet, would have accepted the situation. Her interest
in the prospective pleasures on which Lady Halifax
expatiated was slight; she was obliged to speculate upon
its rising, which she did with all the confidence she
could command. She declined absolutely to read Bryce's
"American Commonwealth," or Miss Bird's account of the
Rocky Mountains, or anybody's travels in the Orient, upon
all of which Miss Halifax had painstakingly fixed her
attention; but one afternoon she ordered a blue serge
travelling-dress and refused one or two literary,
engagements for the present, and the next day wrote to
Lady Halifax that she had decided to go. Her father
received her decision with more relief than he meant to
show, and Janet had a bitter half-hour over it. Then
she plunged with energy into her arrangements, and
Lawrence, Cardiff made her inconsistently happy again
with the interest he took in them, supplemented by an
extremely dainty little travelling-clock. He became
suddenly so solicitous for her that she sometimes quivered
before the idea that he guessed all the reasons that were
putting her to flight, which gave her a wholly unnecessary
pang, for nothing would have astonished Lawrence Cardiff
more than to be confronted, at the moment, with any
passion that was not his own.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

Kendal, as the door closed behind Elfrida on the afternoon
of her last sitting, shutting him in with himself and
the portrait on the easel, and the revelation she had
made, did his best to feel contrition, and wondered that
he was so little successful. He assured himself that he
had been a brute; yet in an uncompromising review of all
that he had ever said or done in connection with Elfrida
he failed to satisfy his own indignation with himself by
discovering any occasion upon which his brutality had
been particularly obvious. He remembered with involuntary
self-justification how distinctly she had insisted upon
_camaraderie_ between them, how she had spurned everything
that savored of another standard of manners on his, part,
how she had once actually had the curious taste to want
him to call her "old chap," and how it had grated. He
remembered her only half-veiled invitation, her challenge
to him to see as much as he cared, and to make what he
could of her. He was to blame for accepting, but he would
have been a conceited ass if he had t