hed Madame de Netteville's cheek with her lips, nodding to the
other men present, and went out, her fair stag-like head well in the
air, 'chaffing' Lord Rupert, who obediently followed her, performing
marvellous feats of agility in his desire to keep out of the way of the
superb train sweeping behind her. It always seemed as if Lady Aubrey
could have had no childhood, as if she must always have had just that
voice and those eyes. Tears she could never have shed, not even as a
baby over a broken toy. Besides, at no period of her life could she
have looked upon a lost possession as anything else than the opportunity
for a new one.

The other men took their departure for one reason or another. It was not
late, but London was in full swing, and M. de Querouelle talked with
gusto of four 'At homes' still to be grappled with.

As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his hand.

'No,' she said, with a quick impetuousness, 'no: I want my talk out. It
is barely half-past ten, and neither of us wants to be racing about
London to-night.'

Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he lingered
rather reluctantly--for another ten minutes, as he supposed.

She threw herself into a low chair. The windows were open to the back of
the house, and the roar of Piccadilly and Sloane Street came borne in
upon the warm night air. Her superb dark head stood out against a stand
of yellow lilies close behind her, and the little paroquet, bright with
all the colours of the tropics, perched now on her knee, now on the back
of her chair, touched every now and then by quick unsteady fingers.

Then an incident followed which Elsmere remembered to his dying day with
shame and humiliation.

In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone, a woman who was
five years his senior had made him what was practically a confession of
love--had given him to understand that she knew what were the relations
between himself and his wife--and had implored him with the quick breath
of an indescribable excitement to see what a woman's sympathy and a
woman's unique devotion could do for the causes he had at heart.

The truth broke upon Elsmere very slowly, awakening in him, when at last
it was unmistakable, a swift agony of repulsion, which his most friendly
biographer can only regard with a kind of grim satisfaction. For after
all there is an amount of innocence and absent-mindedness in matters of
daily human life, which is n