I'm the child's
mother, am I not?"

"It is because you are her mother," he said, quietly, "that I thought you
might be glad to find a suitable home for her."

"What's good enough for me ought to be good enough for her," she
answered, doggedly.

Mannering was silent for a moment. This woman seemed to belong to a
different world from that with whose denizens he was in any way familiar.
Years of isolation, and a certain epicureanism of taste, from which
necessity had never taken the fine edge, had made him a little
intolerant. He could see nothing that was not absolutely repulsive in
this woman, whose fine eyes were seeking even now to attract his
admiration. She was making the best of herself. She had chosen the
darkest corner of the room, and her pose was not ungraceful. Her skirts
were skilfully raised to show just as much as possible of her long,
slender foot, with the patent shoes and silver buckles. She knew that her
ankles were above reproach, and her dress becoming. A dozen men had paid
her compliments during the day, yet she knew that every admiring glance,
every whispered word which had come to her to-day, or for many days past,
would count for nothing if only she could pierce for a single moment the
unchanging coldness of the man who sat watching her now with the face of
a Sphynx. A slow tide of passion welled up in her heart. Was not he a man
and free, and was not she a woman? It was not much she asked from him, no
pledge, no bondage. His kindness only, she told herself, was all she
craved. She wanted him to look at her as other men looked at her. Who was
he that he should set himself on a pedestal? Perhaps he had grown shy
from the rust of his country life, the slow drifting apart from the world
of men and women. Perhaps--she rose swiftly to her feet and crossed the
room.

CHAPTER VI

SACRIFICE

She leaned over him, one hand on the back of his chair, the other seeking
in vain for his.

"Lawrence," she said, "you grow colder and more unkind every day. What
have I done to change you so? I am a foolish woman, I know, but there are
things which I cannot forget."

He rose at once to his feet, and stood apart from her.

"I thought," he said, "I believed that we understood one another."

She laughed softly.

"I am very sure that I do not understand you," she said. "And as for
you--I do not believe that you have ever understood any woman. There was
a time, Lawrence--"

His impassivity was gone