verything----"

"You have given _me_ what I most wanted in the world!" he lied bravely.

"But"--she rose and stood beside him on the hearthrug, tall, and fair, and
slender, and oh! most seductively, maddeningly sweet to his adoring
thought--"but you take nothing for yourself. That bedroom of yours at the
top of the house is wretchedly bare and comfortless; and then, those
absurd pictures!"

She laughed ruefully, recalling the row of pictorially-illustrated nursery
rhymes that adorned the brown-paper dado of Saxham's third-floor bedroom,
the previous tenant having been a family man.

"--Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy; the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds,
and the Cow that jumped over the Moon. How can you endure them?"

She looked at him, and was startled by the set grimness of his face and
the thunderous lowering of the black smudge of eyebrow. He said:

"You went to my room to-day. Why?"

She crimsoned, and stammered:

"It was this morning, after you had gone out. I--it struck me that your
linen ought to be overlooked and put to rights from time to time. How did
you know?"

He did not explain that the perfume of her hair, of her breath, of her
dress, had lingered when she had gone, to tempt and taunt and torture him.
He said nothing of the little knot of violets that had dropped from her
breast upon the floor, and he had found there. His heart beat against it
even then. He answered:

"You told me yourself. And, as for the linen, let it be. The housekeeper
knows that she is expected to attend to it."

"She isn't your wife!"

Her golden eyes flashed at him rebelliously. He was provoking her, in his
innocence of all intention, as a subtle wooer might have planned to do.

"I am extremely glad that she is not." His mouth relaxed in a smile, and
his thunderous brows smoothed themselves. "And now, don't you think you
ought to go and dress? You are dining with Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche
at The Carlton at seven, and going on to a theatre." He held his watch
out. "Six-thirty now," he said, and restored the chronometer to his
waistcoat pocket.

"Very well." She moved a step or two in the direction of the door, and
turned her head as gracefully as a young deer, and looked back at him.
"But you are coming, too?" she said, and her eyes were very soft.

He shook his head.

"It is impossible. I have several urgent cases to visit, and there is an
article for the _Scientific Review_." He moved his hand slightly in t