u are quite sure that you could not go back to your husband?"

After a little pause, she lingeringly said:

"Yes, quite sure. You must know that he will not be the first to break
the ice now." Then she pushed: "You would advise my filing my papers
for divorce?"

Held in this way pitilessly for a direct challenge, he met her eyes
with his own, asking her gently:

"Is there nothing that speaks for Westboro' more distinctly than
anything I can say? And more appealingly than anything which you in
all your pride feel?"

The Duchess assented that there was, with a movement of her lips; she
put her hands over her face and so sat quietly for a few moments, and
when she spoke again to her visitor, her words were irrelevant. When
some few moments after she bade him good-by, she regretted his absence
in London and begged him to come and see her as soon as he returned.

"Come," she said, "at least to see whether I am here or whether I have
pitched my tent and gone away."

As Bulstrode stood in the doorway she asked him: "I understand there
are a lot of people at the castle for Christmas, and among them will be
Mrs. Falconer? Isn't it so? Is she really so very lovely?"

"It's a different type of loveliness from yours," Bulstrode returned.
And the Duchess supposed: "A happier type?"

"Well, she's rather happy I think, take it all together," Jimmy said.

"Has she children?"

"None."

"Is she in love with her husband?"

And he was so long searching for a reply that the Duchess laughed
quietly.

"Poor man," she said, "don't bother. But then since she's so happy,
she must be in love with somebody else's husband."

But he put her right immediately.

"I don't think she in the least is. And why," he went on, "since
happiness is so greatly the question of other people's state of mind,
might we not let it go at the fact that she is herself very much loved?"

The Duchess looked at her guest rather absently. She was thinking of
the happy beauty, the woman of a different type from her own, whose
presence at Westboro' had been sought by her husband for the second
time.

"Oh," she answered rather absently, giving Jimmy her hand, "she
wouldn't, you know, be happy if the feeling were all on the other side."

When the Duke had casually asked his guest's plans for Christmas week,
Bulstrode had come near to offending his host by declaring that he
could not possibly be one of a second house party.

"Do you, then," We