--environed, however, with clouds of indecision and resistance
that would have raised happiness in Mary could she have divined them.

For he was now not easy to capture. There had been enough and more than
enough of women in his life. The game of politics must somehow replace
them henceforth, if, indeed, anything were still worth while, except the
long day in the saddle and the dawn of new mornings in untrodden lands.

Mingled, all these, with hot dislike of Ashe, with the fascination of
Kitty, and a kind of venomous pleasure in the commotion produced by his
pursuit of her; inter penetrated, moreover, through and through with the
memory of his one true feeling, and of the woman who had died, alienated
from and despising him. He and Mary passed a profitless half-hour. He
would have liked to propitiate her, but he had no notion what he should
do with the propitiation, if it were reached. He wanted her money, but
he was beginning to feel with restlessness that he could not pay the
cost. The poet in him was still strong, crossed though it were by the
adventurer.

He took her back to the dancing-room. Mary walked beside him with a
dull, fierce sense of wrong. It was Kitty, of course, who had done
it--Kitty who had taken him away from her.

"That's finished," said Cliffe to himself, with a long breath of relief,
as he delivered her into the hands of her partner. "Now for the other!"

* * * * *

Thenceforward, no one saw Kitty and no one danced with her. She spent
her time in beflowered corners, or remote drawing-rooms, with Geoffrey
Cliffe. Ashe heard her voice in the distance once or twice, answering a
voice he detested; he looked into the supper-room with a lady on his
arm, and across it he saw Kitty, with her white elbow on the table and
her hand propping a face that was turned--half mocking and yet wholly
absorbed--to Cliffe. He saw her flitting across vistas or disappearing
through far doorways, but always with that sinister figure in
attendance.

His mind was divided between a secret fury--roused in him by the pride
of a man of high birth and position, who has always had the world at
command, and now sees an impertinence offered him which he does not know
how to punish--and a mood of irony. Cliffe's persecution of Kitty was a
piece of confounded bad manners. But to look at it with the round,
hypocritical eyes some of these people were bringing to bear on it was
really too much! Let