."

"How imprudent!"

"Indeed, dear mamma, it wasn't cold."

"But you were out there so long. What could you find to talk about all
that time?"

"We were not talking all the time, only enjoying the cool air and the
moonlight."

"Mrs. Tempest's carriage!" roared one of the door-keepers, as if it had
been his doing that the carriage had appeared so quickly.

Captain Winstanley was ready to hand them to their brougham.

"Come and take a cup of tea to-morrow afternoon, and let as talk over
the ball," said the widow.

"With infinite pleasure."

"Shall we drop you at your house?"

"A thousand thanks--no--my lodgings are so close, I'll walk home."

He went back for his overcoat, and then walked slowly away, without
another glance at the crowded ball-room, or the corridors where the
ladies who were waiting for their carriages were contriving to improve
the time by a good deal of quiet, or even noisy, flirtation. His
lodgings were on the Old Steine, close by. But he did not go home
immediately. There are times in a man's life when four walls are to
small too hold the bigness of his thoughts. Captain Winstanley paced
the Marine Parade for half-an-hour or so before he went home.

"_Va pour la mere_," he said to himself, at the close of that half
hour's meditations; "she is really very nice, and the position
altogether advantageous, perhaps as much as one has the right to expect
in the general decadence of things. But, good heavens, how lovely that
girl is! She is the first woman who ever looked me in the face and told
me she disliked me; the first woman who ever gave me contemptuous looks
and scornful words. And yet--for that very reason, perhaps--I----"

The dark brows contracted over the keen eyes, which seemed closer than
usual to the hawk nose.

"Look to yourself, my queen, in the time to come," he said, as he
turned his back on the silvery sea and moonlight sky. "You have been
hard to me and I will be hard to you. It shall be measure for measure."

CHAPTER XII.

"I have no Wrong, where I can claim no Right."

Going home again. That was hard to bear. It reopened all the old
wounds. Violet Tempest felt as if her heart must really break, as if
this new grief were sharper than the old one, when the carriage drove
in through the familiar gates, in the December dusk, and along the
winding shrubberied road, and up to the Tudor porch, where the lion of
the Tempests stood, _passant regardant_, with lifted paw