e needn't pledge anything. We can just
put the case." She smiled thoughtfully. "I'm still not quite sure how Mr
Tristram will take it, you know."

"How he'll take it? He'll jump at it, of course."

"The girl or the title, George?"

"Well, both together. Won't he, Madame Zabriska?"

Mina thought great things of the girl, and even greater, if vaguer, of
the title.

"I should just think so," she replied complacently. There was a limit to
the perversity even of the Tristrams.

"We mustn't put it too baldly," observed Southend, dangling his
eyeglass.

"Oh, he'll think more of the thing itself than of how we put it," Lady
Evenswood declared.

From her knowledge of Harry, the Imp was exactly of that opinion. But
Southend was for diplomacy; indeed what pleasure is there in manoeuvring
schemes if they are not to be conducted with delicacy? A policy that can
be defined on a postage stamp has no attraction for ingenious minds,
although it is usually the most effective with a nation.

Harry Tristram returned from Blinkhampton in a state of intellectual
satisfaction marred by a sense of emotional emptiness. He had been very
active, very energetic, very successful. He had new and cogent evidence
of his power, not merely to start but to go ahead on his own account.
This was the good side. But he discovered and tried to rebuke in himself
a feeling that he had so far wasted the time in that he had seen nobody
and nothing beautiful. Men of affairs had no concern with a feeling like
that. Would Iver have it, or would Mr Disney? Surely not! It would be a
positive inconvenience to them, or at best a worthless asset. He traced
it back to Blent, to that influence which he had almost brought himself
to call malign because it seemed in some subtle way enervating, a thing
that sought to clog his steps and hung about those feet which had need
to be so alert and nimble. Yet the old life at Blent would not have
served by itself now. Was he to turn out so exacting that he must have
both lives before he, or what was in him, could cry "Content"? A man
will sometimes be alarmed when he realizes what he wants--a woman often.

So he came, in obedience to Lady Evenswood's summons, very confident but
rather sombre. When he arrived, a woman was there whom he did not know.
She exhaled fashion and the air of being exactly the right thing. She
was young--several years short of forty--and very handsome. Her manner
was quiet and well-dowered with rep