r one second ignored; now she only worried him,
and made him impatient. Her invitations poured upon him, her affectedly
deep voice, reproachful or alluring, haunted his telephone. She
challenged him daringly, wickedly, across dinner tables, or from the
centre of a tea-table group, to say "why he didn't like her any more?"

Jim went to Italy, and Senta, chaperoned by her sister-in-law, a gaunt
woman of sixty, went, too, turning up at his hotels with the naughty
grace of a spoiled child, sure to be welcome. She eyed him obliquely,
while telling him that "people were beginning to talk." She laughed,
with a delight that Jim found maddening, when they chanced to meet some
friends from Berlin in a quiet side street in Rome. Jim cut his vacation
short, and went back to work.

This angered Senta for the first time, and perhaps began to enlighten
her. She came sulkily back to Berlin, and began to spread abroad
elaborate accounts of a quarrel between Jim and herself. Jim so dreaded
meeting her that he quite gave up everything but men's society, but he
could not quite escape from the knowledge that the affair was discussed
and criticised.

And at this most untimely moment old Professor Stunner died, leaving a
somewhat smaller fortune to his little widow than she had expected, and
naming his esteemed young friend, Herr Doctor Studdiford, as her
guardian and his executor. This again gave Senta the prominence and
picturesqueness she loved; to Jim it was a most deplorable mischance; it
was with difficulty that he acquitted himself of his bare duty in the
matter, his distaste for his young ward growing stronger every moment.
For weeks there was no hour in which he was not made exquisitely
uncomfortable by her attitude of chastened devotion; eventually the hour
came in which he had to stab her pride, and stab deep. It was an ugly,
humiliating, exasperating business, and when at last it was over, Jim
found himself sick of Berlin, and yet sullenly unready to go home to
California, as if he had failed, as if he were under even so faint a
cloud.

Just then came a letter from Eileen, another from Phyllis. Wasn't he
ever coming to London any more? London was waiting to welcome him. They
had opened their little house in Prince's Gate, the season was
beginning, it was really extraordinarily jolly. Did he know anything of
the surgeon, Sir Peveril McCann? He had said such charming things of
Doctor Studdiford. He had said--but no, one wasn't g