e best masters.'

'I never noticed that you were particularly brilliant,' murmured Mrs.
Crowley, raising her eyebrows.

'I never played for brilliancy, I played for safety. I flatter myself
that when prattle was needed, I have never been found wanting. I have
met the ingenuousness of sweet seventeen with a few observations on Free
Trade, while the haggard efforts of thirty have struggled in vain
against a brief exposition of the higher philosophy.'

'When people talk higher philosophy to me I make it a definite rule to
blush,' said Mrs. Crowley.

'The skittish widow of uncertain age has retired in disorder before a
complete acquaintance with the Restoration dramatists, and I have
frequently routed the serious spinster with religious leanings by my
remarkable knowledge of the results of missionary endeavour in Central
Africa. Once a dowager sought to ask me my intentions, but I flung at
her astonished head an article from the Encyclopedia Brittanica. An
American _divorcee_ swooned when I poured into her shell-like ear a few
facts about the McKinley Tariff. These are only my serious efforts. I
need not tell you how often I have evaded a flash of the eyes by an
epigram, or ignored a sigh by an apt quotation from the poets.'

'I don't believe a word you say,' retorted Mrs. Crowley. 'I believe you
never married for the simple reason that nobody would have you.'

'Do me the justice to acknowledge that I'm the only man who's known you
for ten days without being tempted by those coal-mines of yours in
Pennsylvania to offer you his hand and heart.'

'I don't believe the coal has anything to do with it,' answered Mrs.
Crowley. 'I put it down entirely to my very considerable personal
attractions.'

Dick looked at the time and found that the cocktail had given him an
appetite. He asked Mrs. Crowley if she would lunch with him, and gaily
they set out for a fashionable restaurant. Neither of them gave a
thought to Alec and George speeding towards the unknown, nor to Lucy
shut up in her room, given over to utter misery.

* * *

For Lucy it was the first of many dreary days. Dick went to Naples, and
enjoying his new-won idleness, did not even write to her. Mrs. Crowley,
after deciding on a trip to Egypt, was called to America by the illness
of a sister; and Lady Kelsey, unable to stand the rigour of a Northern
winter, set out for Nice. Lucy refused to accompany her. Though she knew
it would be impossible to see her father,