starve their
souls? We are here to express ourselves, not to fast twice in a week.
Yet how few men and women ever dare to express themselves fully?"

Lady Locke looked up, and seemed to come to a sudden resolution.

"Do you ever express your real self by what you say or do?" she asked.

"Yes, always nearly."

"Even by wearing that green carnation?"

There was a ring of earnestness in her voice that evidently surprised
him a little.

"Because," she went on, speaking more rapidly, "I take that as a symbol.
I cannot help it. It seems like the motto of your life, and it is a
tainted motto. Why----"

But at this moment a delicate sound of "Sh-sh!" came from Mrs. Windsor,
and the voice of Jimmie Sands, an uncertain treble with a quaver in it,
was heard singing Esme Amarinth's catch. He sang it right through before
the other circling voices rippled in--

"Rose-white youth,
Pas-sionate, pale,
A singing stream in a silent vale,
A fairy prince in a prosy tale,
Ah! there's nothing in life so finely frail
As rose-white youth."

"Rose-white youth," chimed the other voices, one upon one, until the air
of the night throbbed with the words, and they seemed to wander away
among the sleeping pageant of the flowers, away to the burnished golden
disc of the slowly ascending moon.

Lord Reggie, with his fair head bent, listened with a smile on his lips,
a smile in his grey blue eyes, and Lady Locke watched him and listened
too, and thought of his youth and of all he was doing with it, as a
sensitive, deep-hearted woman will.

And the shrill voices wound on and on, and, at last, detaching
themselves one by one from the melodic fabric in which they were
enmeshed, slipped into silence.

Then Mrs. Windsor spoke aloud and plaintively--

"How exquisite!" she said. "If only they had had on their little
nightgowns!"

And Mr. Smith was shocked.

XI.

Lord Reggie had quite made up his mind to ask Lady Locke to marry him.
He didn't in the least wish to be married, and felt that he never
should. But he also felt that marriage did not matter much either way.
In modern days it is a contract of no importance, as Esme Amarinth often
said, and therefore a contract that can be entered into without
searching of heart or loss of perfect liberty. To him it simply meant
that a good-natured woman, who liked to kiss him, would open an account
for him at her banker's, and let him live with her when he felt