att's social gifts were hardly of a kind to please the two ladies:
he would have shone more brightly in Peter Van Degen's set than in
his wife's. But neither Clare nor Mrs. Fairford had expected a man
of conventional cut, and Moffatt's loud easiness was obviously less
disturbing to them than to their hostess. Undine felt only his
crudeness, and the tacit criticism passed on it by the mere presence of
such men as her husband and Bowen; but Mrs. Fairford' seemed to enjoy
provoking him to fresh excesses of slang and hyperbole. Gradually she
drew him into talking of the Driscoll campaign, and he became recklessly
explicit. He seemed to have nothing to hold back: all the details of the
prodigious exploit poured from him with Homeric volume. Then he broke
off abruptly, thrusting his hands into his trouser-pockets and shaping
his red lips to a whistle which he checked as his glance met Undine's.
To conceal his embarrassment he leaned back in his chair, looked about
the table with complacency, and said "I don't mind if I do" to the
servant who approached to re-fill his champagne glass.

The men sat long over their cigars; but after an interval Undine called
Charles Bowen into the drawing-room to settle some question in dispute
between Clare and Mrs. Fairford, and thus gave Moffatt a chance to be
alone with her husband. Now that their guests had gone she was throbbing
with anxiety to know what had passed between the two; but when Ralph
rejoined her in the drawing-room she continued to keep her eyes on the
fire and twirl her fan listlessly.

"That's an amazing chap," Ralph repeated, looking down at her. "Where
was it you ran across him--out at Apex?"

As he leaned against the chimney-piece, lighting his cigarette, it
struck Undine that he looked less fagged and lifeless than usual, and
she felt more and more sure that something important had happened during
the moment of isolation she had contrived.

She opened and shut her fan reflectively. "Yes--years ago; father had
some business with him and brought him home to dinner one day."

"And you've never seen him since?"

She waited, as if trying to piece her recollections together. "I suppose
I must have; but all that seems so long ago," she said sighing. She had
been given, of late, to such plaintive glances toward her happy girlhood
but Ralph seemed not to notice the allusion.

"Do you know," he exclaimed after a moment, "I don't believe the
fellow's beaten yet."

She loo