she rejoined.

"You're not the same. Have I done anything to upset you?"

"No----"

"Well, tell me, Leo,--tell me what it is! You have been hateful to me
the whole day."

"My dear boy, I haven't. What have I done? I'm just the same, if you
are."

"Just the same?" Denis snorted. "Why, look how you treated me on the
terrace!"

"Oh, that!"

"Yes,--besides, yesterday evening you said that you would tell me to-day
whether you were prepared to do what I suggested. We might have been
well away by now."

Leonetta, who was enjoying the dance far too much to regret not being
"well away by now," tried to appear absent-minded.

"I didn't say to-day--did I?" she observed.

"Oh, well, if you don't remember."

"I may have done."

"Oh, Leo, you don't really love me. You say you do, but you don't."

Nothing on earth is more wearying than an injured and protesting lover.
Better never to have been loved at all than to suffer such persecution.

"My dear boy, what do you want me to do?" she sighed.

"Be as you were three days ago--before----"

"Before what?"

"Before that man came down," Denis ejaculated with the hoarseness of
rage.

She smiled, and there was a suggestion of triumph in the glint of her
large canines.

"He's cured Cleo, any way," she said.

"A nice cure! The heat becomes too intense for somebody, a quack is
called down, the weather cools, as it did twenty-four hours afterwards,
and the quack gets the credit."

In another part of the ballroom Lord Henry and Cleopatra were trying to
entertain one another, and both of them were perspiring freely from the
efforts they were making.

"I think I have at last succeeded in prevailing upon the Tribes to join
me on my trip to China," said Lord Henry, hoping that this subject might
supply more conversation than the previous one had done.

"What will they do?"

"I must have someone, some man who is conscientious, retiring, and
willing to help me and follow my directions without pushing himself
forward. And Tribe is exactly the sort,--unassuming, conscientious, and
meek."

"But what will become of the Inner Light?"

"I hope I shall have dealt that nonsense the severest blow it has ever
received," Lord Henry exclaimed. "At any rate, Mrs. Tribe has done half
the fighting for me. She is most anxious to come. Tribe is simply one of
those people who have an itch to be doing some 'good work.' Give him the
Inner Light or my business in China, he's just as ha