ce
it left me."

"Poor old Roddy."

"Yes, it _was_ 'poor old Roddy,' I can tell you, for the first six
weeks--thought I simply _couldn't_ stand it, had serious thoughts of
kickin' out altogether, seemed to me everythin' had gone ... it's
wonderful, though, the way you pick up. And then everyone's been so
tremendous, and as for Rachel!"

He heaved a great sigh--Her eyes half closed, then she looked very
carefully at the photograph on the little round table. "That's a good
photograph of her you've got."

"Yes--it's my favourite. But you, Duchess, tell me about yourself. You
must be in magnificent form to have planned this great adventure."

She told him about herself--only a little, all very carefully
chosen--She was fancying, as she sat there, that she was again playing
the great diplomatist before the world.

This expedition had greatly excited her, it had fired her blood, and
just now she felt that she was equal to taking up her old life of thirty
years ago, playing once more a tremendous part, beating Mrs. Bronson and
others of her kind straight off the field.

She had a great plan now of coming often to see Roddy and of gaining a
very great influence over him; she did not say to herself in so many
words that she could not bear to think of him lying there helpless and
therefore completely in Rachel's power, but that is what in reality
stirred her.

Roddy's helplessness--the sight and sound of it--drove higher that flame
that had burnt now for so long before the altar at which Rachel was, one
day, to be sacrificed. "She may come and go as she pleases. He lies
here--He can do nothing. He can know nothing of her movements--He's in
her hands--after what I know...."

What did she know? The acquaintanceship of Breton's man-servant and
Dorchester had produced the fact of Rachel's visit, of letters--but
wasn't that all? Amongst the strange mingled visions that now crossed
and recrossed her brain it were hard to say what were real and what
phantasmal. But granted that the two of them had come together at all,
why then it was plain enough to anyone who knew them that only one
result was possible--Poor Roddy ... _her_ poor Roddy!

But she did not know even now that she intended to tell him anything;
her sense of the pain that that revelation would give to him held her,
but as the minutes passed her delight at being back once more in this
gay, bustling world (yes, she liked its new invigorating noises) the
sense of