home" when Miss Van Tuyn called, though no
doubt she was in the house, and the latter left her card, on which she
wrote in pencil, "So sorry not to find you. Do let us meet again soon. I
may not be in London much longer." When she wrote the last sentence she
was really thinking of Paris with a certain irritation of desire. In
Paris she always had a good, even a splendid, time. London was treating
her badly. Perhaps it was hardly worth while to stay on. She had many
adorers in Paris, and no elderly women there ever got in her way.
Frenchmen never ran after elderly women. She could not conceive of any
young Frenchman doing what Craven had done if offered the choice between
a girl of twenty-two and a woman of sixty. Englishmen really were
incomprehensible. Was it worth while to bother about them? Probably not.
But she was by nature combative as well as vain, and Craven's behaviour
had certainly given him a greater value in her estimation. If he had
done the quite ordinary thing, and fallen in love with her at once,
she might have been pleased and yet have thought very little of him. He
would then have been in a class with many others. Now he was decidedly
in a class by himself. If he loved he would not be an ordinary lover.
She was angry with him. She intended some day to punish him. But he
puzzled her, and very definitely now he attracted her.

No; really she would not go back to Paris of the open arms and the
comprehensible behaviour without coming to conclusions with Craven. To
do so would be to retreat practically beaten from the field, and she had
never yet acknowledged a defeat.

Besides, she had something in prospect, something that for the moment,
at any rate, would hold her in London even without the attraction, half
repellent, of Craven. Evidently Dick Garstin, for whatever reason, had
done something, or was about to do something, for her. Always he managed
to be irritating. It was just like him to spend two hours alone with her
without saying one word about the living bronze, and then to rouse her
curiosity when it was impossible that it should be gratified owing
to the presence of Braybrooke. Garstin could never do anything in a
pleasant and comfortable way. He must always, even in kindness, be
semi-malicious. There was at times something almost Satanic in his
ingenious avoidance of the common humanities. But it seemed that he was
about to comply with her expressed whim. He had surely spoken to the
Cafe Royal