beautiful
woman--a time wherein she suddenly realises how trivial a thing her
beauty is--how limited, how useless, how ineffectual!

Millicent Chyne made a little appealing movement towards Meredith, who
relentlessly stepped back. It was the magic of the love that filled his
heart for Oscard. Had she wronged any man in the world but Guy
Oscard, that little movement--full of love and tenderness and sweet
contrition--might have saved her. But it was Oscard's heart that she had
broken; for broken they both knew it to be, and Jack Meredith stepped
back from her touch as from pollution. His superficial, imagined love
for her had been killed at a single blow. Her beauty was no more to him
at that moment than the beauty of a picture.

"Oh, Jack!" she gasped; and had there been another woman in the room
that woman would have known that Millicent loved him with the love that
comes once only. But men are not very acute in such matters--they either
read wrong or not at all.

"It is all a mistake," she said breathlessly, looking from one to the
other.

"A most awkward mistake," suggested Meredith, with a cruel smile that
made her wince.

"Mr. Oscard must have mistaken me altogether," the girl went on, volubly
addressing herself to Meredith--she wanted nothing from Oscard. "I may
have been silly, perhaps, or merely ignorant and blind. How was I to
know that he meant what he said?"

"How, indeed?" agreed Meredith, with a grave bow.

"Besides, he has no business to come here bringing false accusations
against me. He has no right--it is cruel and ungentlemanly. He cannot
prove anything; he cannot say that I ever distinctly gave him to
understand--er, anything--that I ever promised to be engaged or anything
like that."

She turned upon Oscard, whose demeanour was stolid, almost dense. He
looked very large and somewhat difficult to move.

"He has not attempted to do so yet," suggested Jack suavely, looking at
his friend.

"I do not see that it is quite a question of proofs," said Oscard
quietly, in a voice that did not sound like his at all. "We are not in a
court of justice, where ladies like to settle these questions now. If we
were I could challenge you to produce my letters. There is no doubt of
my meaning in them."

"There are also my poor contributions to--your collection," chimed in
Jack Meredith. "A comparison must have been interesting to you, by the
same mail presumably, under the same postmark."

"I made no c