hat is
happening. You seem to have had nothing to say to Lord Lindfield all
day. I thought, perhaps, you had given it up. It was too hard for you,
dear. I don't wonder you found you could not compass it."

Jeannie gave a little impatient sound; her nerves were sharply on edge.

"Dear Alice," she said, "that is not very clever of you. I thought you
would see. However, I am quite glad you don't, for if you don't I am
sure Daisy doesn't. I am getting a respite from Daisy's--well, Daisy's
loathing of me and my methods. She, like you, probably thinks I have
given him back to her."

Jeannie was prowling up and down the room rather in the manner of some
restless caged thing. In spite of her tiredness and her disquietude, it
seemed to Lady Nottingham that she had never seen her look so beautiful.
She looked neither kind nor genial nor sympathetic, but for sheer
beauty, though rather formidable, there were no two words to it.

"Sit down, Jeannie," said Alice quietly. "You are only exciting
yourself. And tell me about it all. I understand nothing, it seems."

Jeannie paused a moment in her walk, and then fell to pacing the
room again.

"No, I'm not exciting myself," she said, "but it is exciting me. I
don't stir myself up by walking; I am merely attempting, not very
successfully, to walk my excitement off. Oh, Alice, what wild beasts
we are at bottom! Prey! Prey! Prey! It is one of the instincts that
we--you and I, nice women--are rarely conscious of; but I doubt
whether it is ever quite dormant. Yes, that comes later; I will
explain from the beginning.

"The beginning of it all was easy," she said. "It is perfectly easy for
any woman to capture the attention of a man like that, even when he is
seriously thinking of getting married to a girl. There was no difficulty
in making him take me to the concert, in making him neglect Daisy those
first two days. He liked me immensely, and, oh! Alice, here was the
first extra difficulty, I liked him. We became friends. We mentioned the
word friend openly as applied to us. And I felt like--like a man who
gets a wild bird to sit on his hand and eat out of it, in order to grab
it, and if not to wring its neck, to put it into a cage. I meant to put
him into a cage, shut the door, and go away. And then yesterday
afternoon in the punt, just after we had made our discovery that we were
friends, he confided in me. He told me he was going to settle down and
marry! Judge of my rage, my disapp