he world; she knew all about girls and their
husbands. Amabel was only a girl, and that was the trouble, she seemed
to say. When she grew older she would see that it would come right;
husbands were always so; the wider life reached by marriage would atone
in many ways. And Lady Elliston, all with sweetest discretion, had asked
gentle questions. Some of them Amabel had not understood; some she had.
She remembered now that her own silence or dull negation might have
seemed very rude and ungrateful; yet Lady Elliston had taken no offence.
All her memories of Lady Elliston were of this tact and sweetness, this
penetrating, tentative tact and sweetness that sought to understand and
help and that drew back, unflurried and unprotesting before rebuff,
ready to emerge again at any hint of need,--of these, and of her great
beauty, the light of her large clear eyes, the whiteness of her throat,
the glitter of diamonds about and above: for it was always in her most
festal aspect, at night, under chandeliers and in ball-rooms, that she
best remembered her. Amabel knew, with the deep, instinctive sense of
values which was part of her inheritance and hardly, at that time, part
of her thought, that her mother would not have liked Lady Elliston,
would have thought her worldly; yet, and this showed that Amabel was
developing, she had already learned that worldliness was compatible with
many things that her mother would have excluded from it; she could see
Lady Elliston with her own and with her mother's eyes, and it was
puzzling, part of the pain of growth, to feel that her own was already
the wider vision.

Soon after that the real story came. The city began to burn and smoke
and flames to blind and scorch her.

It was at Lady Elliston's country house that Amabel first met Paul
Quentin. He was a daring young novelist who was being made much of
during those years; for at that still somewhat guileless time to be
daring had been to be original. His books had power and beauty, and he
had power and beauty, fierce, dreaming eyes and an intuitive, sudden
smile. Under his aspect of careless artist, his head was a little turned
by his worldly success, by great country-houses and flattering great
ladies; he did not take the world as indifferently as he seemed to.
Success edged his self-confidence with a reckless assurance. He was an
ardent student of Nietzsche, at a time when that, too, was to be
original. Amabel met this young man constantly at