ous--especially in women."

There was nothing very much in the words, and Kate was careful to look
straight in front of her as she uttered them. Still they told.

"You mean," said Ayre, "there may be an affectation of freshness and
enthusiasm--gush, in fact--as bad, or worse, than cynicism, and really
springing from the same root?"

Kate had not arrived at any such definite meaning, but she nodded her
head.

"An assumed sprightliness," continued Ayre cheerfully, "perhaps
coquettishness?"

"Exactly," Kate assented, "and a way of pushing into conversations which
my mother used to say girls had better let alone."

This was tolerably direct, but it did not satisfy Ayre's malicious
humor, and he was on the point of a new question when Haddington, who
had taken no part in the previous conversation, but had his reasons for
interfering now, put in suavely:

"If Miss Bernard and you, Ayre, will forgive me, are we not wandering
from the point?"

"Was there any point to wander from?" suggested Eugene.

So they drifted through the evening, skirting the coast of quarrels and
talking of everything except that of which they were thinking. Verily,
love affairs do not always conduce to social enjoyment--more especially
other people's love affairs. Still, Sir Roderick Ayre was entertained.

Meanwhile, Stafford sat in his room alone, save for the company of his
own picture. He was like a man who has been groping his way through
difficult paths in the dark--uneasy, it may be, and nervous, but with no
serious alarm. On a sudden, a storm-flash may reveal to him that he is
on the very edge of a precipice or already ankle-deep in some bottomless
morass. The sight of his own face, interpreted with all Morewood's
penetrating insight and mastery of hand, had been a revelation to him.
No more mercilessly candid messenger could have been found. Arguments he
would have resisted or confuted; appeals to his own consciousness would
have failed for want of experience; he could not affect to disbelieve
the verdict of his own countenance. He had in all his life been a man
who dealt plainly with himself; it was only in this last matter that the
power, more than the will, to understand his own heart had failed him.
His intellect now reasserted itself. He did not attempt to blink facts;
he did not deny the truth of the revelation or seek to extenuate its
force. He did not tell himself that the matter was a trifle, or that its
effect would be tran