e!"

"Well?"

"You're rather a dear old thing, you know," she said, "although you're
so serious."

"And you're quite nice," he admitted, "although you're such an
incorrigible little flirt."

"How do you know?" she laughed. "You never give me a chance of showing
what I can do in that direction."

"Too old, my dear young lady," her host lamented, as he mixed himself a
whisky and soda.

"Rubbish!" she scoffed. "Too much in love with some one else, I believe."

"These are too strenuous days for that sort of thing," he rejoined,
"except for children like you and Mr. Wilshaw."

"I don't know so much about that," she objected. "The world has never
gone so queerly that people haven't remembered to go on loving and be
made love to. Look at the war marriages."

"Yes--and the war divorces," he reminded her.

"Brute!" she exclaimed, with a little grimace.

"Why 'brute'?" he protested. "You can't deny them. Some of these
marriages were genuine enough, of course. Others were simply the result
of a sort of amorous hysteria. Affected every one in those days just
like a germ."

"John Wingate!"

"Yes?"

"Don't try to be cynical."

"I'm not."

"You are," she persisted. "There isn't a man breathing who has a more
wonderful capacity for caring than you. You hide your feelings from most
people. Are you very angry with me for having guessed? I have, you know."

Wingate paused in the act of lighting a cigarette.

"What's that?"

"I think I have a sort of second sight in such matters, especially as
regards people in whom I am interested," Sarah continued, "and if there
is one woman in the world whom I really adore, and for whom I am heartily
sorry, it is Josephine Dredlinton."

"She has a rotten time," was Wingate's terse comment.

"Very few people know how rotten," Sarah went on. "She has lost nearly
all her own relations in the war, her husband has spent the greater part
of her fortune, flaunted his affairs with various actresses in the face
of all London, shilly-shallied through the war as a recruiting officer,
or on any odd job that kept him safely at home, and now he openly
associates with a little company of men in the City who are out to make
money any old way they can get hold of it."

"Lord Dredlinton is a bad lot," Wingate acquiesced.

"And Josephine is an angel," Sarah declared warmly. "If I were a man--"

"Well, you're not," he interrupted.

"If I were a man," she went on, laying her hand upon his,