stark of pretenses. When he sought her eyes, they were calm as ever.
"You're a most bewildering woman--the most bewildering I ever met," he
confessed.

"Except my sister," she corrected.

He glanced up at the portrait and back to her, comparing the features.
"Yes, I see it now. She is your sister. I ought to have guessed. But I
haven't met her; so I don't except her."

Maisie busied herself with passing the dishes. She had a way of making
everything appear conventional by the unruffled quiet with which she
accepted it. At the back of her mind she seemed to be smiling at the
domestic scene she had achieved with this man, who should have been her
enemy.

"No, you haven't met her," she assented. "But until you've met her, you
won't rest; and after you've met her, you won't rest either.--And so you
think I'm bewildering! You thought something else, which you didn't have
the courage to put into words. Bewildering and dangerous--the most
dangerous woman you'd ever met--that was what you meant."

He smiled with a shade of embarrassment. "I might have called you the
most disconcerting woman; you're all of that. No man of sense, who
valued his peace of mind, would tell any woman she was dangerous."

"I don't see why. Why shouldn't he? Do tell me. I shan't be offended."
She leant forward, absorbing him with her childish eyes, her lips
parted with expectancy.

"Because----" Tabs checked himself while he studied the tantalizing
innocence of her expression. He felt certain that he was going to say
something irresistibly unwise. To gain time he looked away and commenced
aimlessly stirring his cup. "Well, if you must have it, because to tell
a woman that would be to tempt her to be dangerous."

"But I love to be tempted," she said eagerly; "temptation is the yeast
of life." And then in a whisper, speaking less to him than to herself,
"A woman knows that she's old when temptation ends."

Like ripples from a stone flung into water the poignancy of what she had
implied rather than uttered, spread away with a commotion which grew
ever fainter. They sat without change of posture at either end of the
couch, she bending towards him, he gazing down into his cup as though by
staring into it he could retain his grip on the conventions. There was
no sound, save the rustling of live coals in the grate. Outside the
window the toy boat floated, a symbol of men's and women's ineffectual
childishness, always dreaming of adventures on which