handful whose interests lie outside themselves, and
who are not desirous of pleasing indiscriminately, it is difficult for
either to realise the passionate desire to please which possesses and
saps the life of some of their sisters. Admiration with them is not a
luxury, any more than a hot-water bottle is a luxury to the aged, or a
foot rest to a gouty foot. It is a necessity of life. After a becoming
interval, the interstices of which had been filled with flowers, the
duke proposed to Lady Bellairs for Fay's hand. Fay did not wish to marry
him. He was not in the least her ideal. Neither did she wish to remain
unmarried, neither did she wish to part with her grave, distinguished
suitor who was an ornament to herself. And she was distinctly averse to
living any longer in the paternal home, lost in a remote crease in a
Hampshire down. Poor women have only too frequently to deal with these
complicated situations, with which blundering, egotistic male minds are
seldom in perfect sympathy.

Fay had never willingly relinquished any of the men who had cared for
her, and some had cared much. These last had as a rule torn themselves
away from her, leaving hearts, or other fragments of themselves, behind,
and were not to be cajoled back again, even by one of her little
gilt-edged notes. But the duke did not break away. He had selected her,
she pleased him, he desired to marry an Englishwoman. He had the
approval of Lady Bellairs.

The day came when Fay was suddenly and adroitly confronted with the fact
that she must marry him, or lose him.

Many confirmed bachelors who openly regret that they have never come
across a woman to whom they cared to tie themselves for life might be
in a position to descant on the inability of wives to enter into their
husbands' inmost feelings, if only they--the bachelors--had known on a
past occasion how to act with sudden promptitude on the top of patience.

The duke played the waiting game, and then hit hard. He had coolly
allowed himself to be trifled with, until the moment arrived when it did
not suit him to be trifled with any longer.

The marriage had not proved a marked success, nor an entire failure. The
duke was an irreproachable husband, but, like many men who marry when
they are no longer young, he aged suddenly after marriage. He quickly
became bald and stout. His tact except in these two particulars remained
flawless. He never allowed his deep chagrin to appear when, three years
aft