t you have done
to me, it is no more than my right."

It had happened as Jeannie feared it might. She felt her throat go
suddenly dry, and once she tried to speak without being able. Then she
commanded her voice again.

"You were in Paris two years ago," she said. "There was a woman there
who lived in the Rue Chalgrin. She called herself Madame Rougierre."

"Well?" said he.

"Daisy's sister," said Jeannie, with a sob.

* * * * *

She turned away from him as she spoke, and leant against the bookcase
behind her table. It was a long time before he moved, and then, still
with back turned, she heard him approach her, and he took her hand and
kissed it.

"I love and I honour you," he said.

Jeannie gave one immense sigh.

"Oh, Tom," she said, "you are a man!"

"It is of your making, then," said he.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Easter fell late next year, but spring had come early, and had behaved
with unusual sweetness and constancy, for from the middle of March to
mid-April there had been a series of days from which winter had
definitely departed. In most years April produces two or three west-wind
days of enervating and languorous heat, but then recollects itself and
peppers the confiding Englishman with hail and snow, blown as out of a
pea-shooter from the northeast, just to remind him that if he thinks
that summer is going to begin just yet he is woefully mistaken. But this
year the succession of warm days had been so uninterrupted that Lady
Nottingham had made the prodigious experiment of asking a few people
down to Bray for a week-end party at Easter itself.

She was conscious of her amazing temerity, for she knew well that
anything might happen; that the river, instead of being at the
bottom of the garden, might so change its mind about their relative
positions that in a few hours the garden would be at the bottom of
the river, or, again, this bungalow of a house might be riddled and
pierced with arctic blasts.

But, in spite of these depressing possibilities, she particularly
wanted to have a few, a very few, people down for that Sunday. They
had all a special connection with Bray. Things had happened there
before, and it was a party of healed memories that was to gather
there. If, after all, the weather turned out to be hopelessly
unpropitious, they could all sit in a ring round the fire, holding
each other's hands. She felt sure they would like to do that.
Probably there