didn't tell you
before, for there was no use in it. But after that I don't think I
should ask him if I were you."

Jeannie was silent a moment.

"But he wants to see me now," she said.

"I know. But I don't think he wants to be with us alone. You understand
that, I expect."

Jeannie sighed.

"Poor Tom!" she said. "Yet I don't know why I say 'poor.' I think he
likes life."

"I don't think he loves it as you and I do."

Jeannie's eyes suddenly filled with tears.

"I am awfully sorry for that," she said. "Sometimes I feel frightfully
guilty, and then suddenly on the top of that I feel innocent. Oh, to be
plain, I feel more than innocent. I feel dreadfully laudable. And then,
to do me justice, I put up a little prayer that I may not become a prig
or a donkey."

He laughed.

"Please, don't," he said. "I should not know you. But you made a man of
him."

"Ah, yes; he has told you that. It is not the case. He made a man of
himself."

Victor held up his hand.

"I don't want to know what happened," he said. "I am quite content to
leave it. He became a man, and you were always my beloved."

Some backward surge of memory stirred in Jeannie.

"Quite always?" she said. "You never wanted to ask me about it?"

"No, dear, never," he said. "Not because I was complacent or anything of
that kind, but simply because we loved each other."

This, then, was the foundation of Lady Nottingham's Easter party.
Jeannie and her husband would come, and so, as a corollary, Lord
Lindfield would come. Then there would be the newly-engaged couple,
namely, Daisy and Willie Carton. Either of them would go, as steel
filings go to the magnet, wherever the other was, and without the least
sense of compunction Lady Nottingham told each of them separately that
the other was coming to her. She had been rather late in doing this,
and, as a matter of fact, Willie, no longer hoping for it, had made
another engagement. But he did not even frown or consider that. He wrote
a cheerful, scarcely apologetic note to Mrs. Beaumont, merely saying he
found he could not come. Nature and art alike--and Mrs. Beaumont was a
subtle compound of the two--allow much latitude to lovers, and she did
not scold him.

At this stage in her proceedings Lady Nottingham suddenly abandoned the
idea of a party at all. There was Victor and Jeannie, and their
corollary, Tom Lindfield; there was Daisy and her corollary, Willie;
there was herself. Gladys would be there t