-this dimpled creature she has clasped and kissed! The icy,
tinkling giggle of the mother breaks in upon the thought.

"Of all the queer situations I ever struck, I do call this the queerest!
Me, meeting you like this, and both of us getting quite pally! All over
Baby, too!... Lord! isn't it enough to make you die? Don't mind me being a
bit hysterical!" Lady Beauvayse dabs her tearful eyes with a cobwebby
square of laced cambric. "It'll be over in a sec. And then, Miss
Mildare--I beg pardon--Mrs. Saxham--you and me will have it out!"

"I am afraid I must be going." Lynette rises, and stands beside Lessie,
looking down in painful hesitation at the blinking, reddened eyelids and
the working mouth. "I have guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it
not be wise of you to go home and lie down?"

The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an intolerable sting.
Lessie jumps in her buckled Louis Quinze shoes, wheels, and confronts her
newly-discovered enemy with glaring eyes.

"Go home ... lie down!" she shrieks, so shrilly that the sleeping cherub
awakens, and adds her frightened roars to the clamour that scares the
gulls. "If I _had_ lain down and gone to my long home eighteen months ago,
when you were cooped up in Gueldersdorp with my husband, it would have
suited you both down to the ground!" She turns, with a stamp of her
imperious little foot, upon the scared nurse, who is vainly endeavouring
to still Baby. "Take her away! Carry her out of hearing! Do what you're
told, you silly fool!" she orders. "And you"--she wheels again upon
Lynette, her wistarias nodding, her chains and bangles clanking--"why do
you stand there, like a white deer in a park--like an image cut out of
ivory? Don't you understand that I, the woman you've pitied--my God!
pitied, for singing and dancing on the public stage 'with so few clothes
on'"--she savagely mimics the manner and tone--"I am the lawful wife of
the man you tried to trap--the Right Honourable John Basil Edward Tobart!"
The painted lips sneer savagely. "Beautiful Beau, who never went back on a
man, or told the truth to a woman!--that's his character, and it pretty
well sizes him up!"

Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled hand
clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical instinct in the daughter of
the footlights has led her to work up the scene; but her rage of wounded
love and jealousy is genuine enough, though not as real as the innocence
in