atulate you on your election to Brookes's," stammered his
lordship, "but for Heaven's sake be cautious at play. Really, the
younger men there are trying to revive the worst traditions in gaming.
The loo was rather high at Chetwynd's last night," he added, with a
studied air of guilt. "I won L500 from my host. I call that the
limit--even on old Cabinet Steinberg!"

He smiled, he waved his hand, feeling that he had displayed great taste
in a situation of enormous difficulty. Something unusual, too, in the
young man's face touched his heart. It seemed to him that here was one
who had felt the world's buffets.

"I have never been just in my estimate of Mr. Orange," said he to Sara,
as he re-entered the drawing-room. "I quite took to him to-day. He has a
fine countenance, and I am sure he is very much cut up by this painful
affair. It's a pity he's a Catholic, for he would make such an excellent
canon for St. Paul's. He would _look_ the part so well."

"'Happiness, that nymph with unreturning feet,' has passed him by," said
Sara, watching herself in one of the mirrors.

"She has passed a good many," sighed his lordship. "But play me that
lovely air which Titiens sings in _Il Flauto Magico_."

CHAPTER XVI

Agnes was too ill to appear at the Duchess of Pevensey's dinner that
evening. Lord Reckage's melancholy, absent air during the entertainment,
and his early withdrawal from the distinguished party, were referred,
with sympathy, to the very proper distress he felt at Miss Carillon's
tiresome indisposition. The time passed well enough for him--far better,
in fact, than he had expected, for he was relieved from the strain of
"dancing attendance" on his betrothed--a thing which he, even more than
most men, found silly. In the chivalrous days of tournaments,
troubadours and crusades this romantic exercise of seeming enslaved was,
he held, justifiable, even interesting. But in modern life it had an
appearance of over-emphasis.

Poor Agnes, however, could neither eat, nor sleep, nor rest. Her temples
throbbed, her eyes ached; every nerve was a barbed wire; her soul was
manacled by promises; she would not use her reason; the fever in her
veins was not to be quelled, and the one agitating relief to her
physical suffering was a constant perusal of David Rennes's letter. It
was the first passionate love-letter she had ever received. Just as a
river may stream peacefully through pastoral lands till it joins the sea
and b