s the arch; leaving a bloody trail as he
crawled along the ground, he contrived to reach the gate and fell
across its threshold. His head lay on his arm, the string of his
broken eyeglass wound pathetically about his wrist. The Duke proved to
be a modern replica of the poor knight who fell, face downwards, on the
grass when Elizabeth's carriage passed him by, some four hundred years
before the present Duke.

After Bulstrode had left her, the Duchess of Westboro' hurried back to
the house that was not her home; to the little long drawing-room that
was not hers. For the first time since her voluntary exile, since her
occupation of this asylum, she found it bereft of charm and the cosey,
dear place as cold to her as if the snows had drifted in and filled a
deserted nest. It had nevertheless been a cloister, and she knew it,
where the best of her had prayed, where the true woman--and the true
woman is always something of a saint--had folded submissive hands,
where self had gone away and left nothing at all but love.

On this Christmas Eve, The Dials was the loneliest corner of England.
The scarcely occupied house suggested to the Duchess the thought of a
stocking hung before a chimney when there were no children who cared
whether it was filled or not, when there was no reason why St. Nicholas
should pass. But it was only the very edge of her thoughts that
touched anything so fantastic as this picture. The Duchess was serious
and lonely. With a sigh, and winking back tears she threw off her
furs, laid off her hat, and, after poking up the fire into sparkling
brightness, she wandered up-stairs to the apartment that she had made
her bedroom. Under the low eaves the bed-chamber shone out gay with
chintz, fresh and sweet as a midwinter bouquet, the frostiness coming
in around it through the slightly opened window, and there was the
scent of the firs and the cedar wood that closely hemmed the old place
in.

"Heavens!" thought the Duchess, half aloud. "How dreadfully in love
Jimmy Bulstrode is, how dreadfully, faithfully in love!" And then she
went on to say: "How dreadfully I am myself in love, and no one is
hurrying to _me_!"

She walked aimlessly about the pretty room, irritated and annoyed at
the cloister effect. She found it too remote, too virgin, and no room
for a wife. "I promised," she mused, "to wait until Mrs. Falconer has
gone. I shall break my promise. Oh, I can't really wait at all! If
things ar