d been
holding suspended in her small fingers.

"I don't know anything about them."

"Because," he hesitated, "your own life has been so happy?"

She evaded him. "Don't you think that jealousy will soon be as dead
as--saying your prayers and going to church? I never meet anybody that
cares enough--to be jealous."

She spoke first with passionate force, then with contempt, glancing
across the room at Madeleine Alcot. Cliffe saw the look, and remembered
that Mrs. Alcot's husband, a distinguished treasury official, had been
for years the intimate friend of a very noble and beautiful woman,
herself unhappily married. There was no scandal in the matter, though
much talk. Mrs. Alcot meanwhile had her own affairs; her husband and she
were apparently on friendly terms; only neither ever spoke of the other;
and their relations remained a mystery.

Cliffe bent over to Kitty.

"And yet you said you could understand?--such things didn't seem strange
to you."

She gave a little, reckless laugh.

"Did I? It's like the people who think they could act or sing, if they
only had the chance. I choose to think I could feel. And of course I
couldn't. We've lost the power. All the old, horrible, splendid things
are dead and done with."

"The old passions, you mean?"

"And the old poems! <i>You'll</i> never write like that again."

"God forbid!" said Cliffe, under his breath. Then as Kitty rose he
followed her with his eyes. "Lady Kitty, you've thrown me a challenge
that you hardly understand. Some day I must answer it."

"Don't answer it," said Kitty, hastily.

"Yes, if I can drag the words out," he said, sombrely. She met his look
in a kind of fascination, excited by the memory of the story which had
been told her, by her own audacity in speaking of it, by the presence of
the dead passion she divined lying shrouded and ghastly in the mind of
the man beside her. Even the ugly things of which he was accused did but
add to the interest of his personality for a nature like hers, greedy of
experience, and discontented with the real.

While he on his side was nattered and astonished by her attitude towards
him, as Ashe's wife, she would surely dislike and try to trample on him.
That was what he had expected.

* * * * *

"I hear you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty," said the Dean, who, having
obstinately outstayed all the other guests, had now settled his small
person and his thin legs into a chair