ments before they get their decree. One of
them--_her_ name was Mabel--as far as I could make out, her husband
found out that she meant to divorce him by noticing that she wore a new
engagement-ring."

"Well, you see Leila did everything 'regularly,' as the French say," Ide
rejoined.

"Yes; but are these people in society? The people my neighbours talk
about?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "It would take an arbitration commission a
good many sittings to define the boundaries of society nowadays. But
at any rate they're in New York; and I assure you you're _not_; you're
farther and farther from it."

"But I've been back there several times to see Leila." She hesitated
and looked away from him. Then she brought out slowly: "And I've never
noticed--the least change--in--in my own case--"

"Oh," he sounded deprecatingly, and she trembled with the fear of having
gone too far. But the hour was past when such scruples could restrain
her. She must know where she was and where Leila was. "Mrs. Boulger
still cuts me," she brought out with an embarrassed laugh.

"Are you sure? You've probably cut _her_; if not now, at least in the
past. And in a cut if you're not first you're nowhere. That's what keeps
up so many quarrels."

The word roused Mrs. Lidcote to a renewed sense of realities. "But the
Pursues," she said--"the Pursues are so strong! There are so many of
them, and they all back each other up, just as my husband's family did.
I know what it means to have a clan against one. They're stronger than
any number of separate friends. The Pursues will _never_ forgive Leila
for leaving Horace. Why, his mother opposed his marrying her because
of--of me. She tried to get Leila to promise that she wouldn't see me
when they went to Europe on their honeymoon. And now she'll say it was
my example."

Her companion, vaguely stroking his beard, mused a moment upon this;
then he asked, with seeming irrelevance, "What did Leila say when you
wrote that you were coming?"

"She said it wasn't the least necessary, but that I'd better come,
because it was the only way to convince me that it wasn't."

"Well, then, that proves she's not afraid of the Purshes."

She breathed a long sigh of remembrance. "Oh, just at first, you
know--one never is."

He laid his hand on hers with a gesture of intelligence and pity.
"You'll see, you'll see," he said.

A shadow lengthened down the deck before them, and a steward stood
there, proffering a Ma