stian name was Pansy--and
her husband's profession. The third, about which she might surely have
been less reticent, was the name of the town where she lived and from
which she appeared to be travelling that day.

The actual incidents of that eventful October journey had become, to a
certain extent, blurred in Theodore Carden's memory, but what had
followed was still extraordinarily vivid, and to-day, on this holiday
morning, standing idly looking out of the window, he allowed his mind
a certain retrospective licence.

From whom, so he now asked himself, had first come the suggestion that
there should be no parting at Euston between himself and the strange,
elemental woman he had found so full of unforced fascination and
disarming charm? The answer soon came echoing down the corridors of
memory: from himself, of course--but then, and even now the memory
brought with it shamefaced triumph, he remembered her quick
acquiescence, as free, as unashamed, as joyous as that of a spoilt
child acclaiming an unlooked-for treat.

And, after all, what harm had there been in the whole halcyon
adventure--what injury had it caused to any human being? Carden put
the husband, the fatuous old man who had had the incredible folly to
marry a girl thirty-five years younger than himself, out of court.
Pansy, light-hearted, conscienceless Pansy--he always thought of her
with a touch of easy tenderness--had run no risk of detection, for, as
he had early discovered, she knew no one in London, with the solitary
exception of the old cousin who lived in Upper Norwood. As for his own
business acquaintances, he might, of course, have been seen by any of
them taking about this singularly attractive woman, for the two went
constantly to the theatre, and daily to one or other of the great
restaurants. But what then? Excepting that she was quieter in manner,
far better dressed, and incomparably prettier, Pansy might have been
the wife or sister of any one of his own large circle of relations,
that great Carden clan who held their heads so high in the business
world of the Midlands.

Nay, nay, no risk had been run, and no one had been a penny the worse!
Indeed, on looking back, Theodore Carden could tell himself that it
had been a perfect, a flawless episode, and perhaps after all it was
well that there had been no attempt at a repetition. And yet? And yet
the young man, especially during the first few weeks which had
followed that sequence of enchan