nt--like a nervous skater who knows that
if she pauses she will fall.

And all at once it happened--the monstrous--the incredible thing.

What he had thought that she was saying, Sophy could never divine. Even
long afterwards when she could think of it with comparative calmness,
she could not imagine what he could have thought--or could she ever
remember what it was that she had really been saying. But whatever it
was, as the words came from her smiling lips, suddenly, barking it out
at her, before that brilliant company, before some of the most famous
men and women of the day--her husband called down the long table to her:

"You lie!"

She was so startled--the thing was so incredible--that, thinking she had
not heard aright, she turned towards him and said:

"What, Cecil?"

He called again, distinctly:

"I say you lied. What you said just now was a lie."

Then, his arms still on the table, his shoulders hunched, he began
sipping a fresh glass of wine, staring moodily before him, with a sort
of vacant, bovine ferocity in his fixed eyes.

Every one has noticed how some trivial fact always imprints itself
indelibly on one's mind in such ghastly moments. Opposite Sophy sat the
beautiful Duchess of Maidsdowne. As Chesney shouted his insult at his
wife, the blood rushed in a scarlet wave to the roots of the Duchess's
chestnut hair, and the lovely, violent crimson glowed, painfully
over-brilliant, on her cheeks for the rest of the evening. This agonised
blush was the one thing that Sophy could ever clearly recall of the
moments that followed. All went black about her the next instant; then
her will conquered, and she sat still, and conscious, but all that she
was conscious of was that the Duchess of Maidsdowne had blushed crimson,
and that this crimson still dyed her lovely face. Sophy had heard that
she was consumptive and that she rouged to conceal her illness. Now she
kept thinking, "No. She does not rouge. I must remember to tell Olive.
She does not rouge at all. What a wonderful colour. And how it rushed
up to the very edge of her hair."

Next there came over her another strange feeling which also every one is
familiar with. She felt that she was in one of those dreams, wherein one
finds oneself on the street or in a crowded assembly, insufficiently
clad, for every one to stare and wonder at.

Beside her sat Amaldi, no paler than some others at that table, yet
realising how much worse than death it is to lov