o ought to
apologize. What a number of ways there seem to be of making love, and
yours is such an odd way!"

Now to apologize for playing a poor part is one thing, and to put up
with the charge of playing a part poorly is quite another.
Nevertheless, he kept his temper.

"You have discovered an excellent way of punishing me," he said
manfully, "and I submit. Indeed, I admire you the more. So I am paying
you a compliment when I whisper that I know you knew."

But she would not have it. "You are so strangely dense to-night," she
said. "Surely, if I had known, I would have stopped you. You forget
that I am a married woman," she added, remembering Pips rather late in
the day.

"There might be other reasons why you did not stop me," he replied
impulsively.

"Such as?"

"Well, you--you might have wanted me to go on."

He blurted it out.

"So," said she slowly, "you are apologizing to me for not going on?"

"I implore you, Lady Pippinworth," Tommy said, in much distress, "not
to think me capable of that. If I moved you for a moment, I am far
from boasting of it; it makes me only the more anxious to do what is
best for you."

This was not the way it had shaped during dinner, and Tommy would have
acted wisely had he now gone out to cool his head. "If you moved me?"
she repeated interrogatively; but, with the best intentions, he
continued to flounder.

"Believe me," he implored her, "had I known it could be done, I should
have checked myself. But they always insist that you are an iceberg,
and am I so much to blame if that look of hauteur deceived me with the
rest? Oh, dear Lady Disdain," he said warmly, in answer to one of her
most freezing glances, "it deceives me no longer. From that moment I
knew you had a heart, and I was shamed--as noble a heart as ever beat
in woman," he added. He always tended to add generous bits when he
found it coming out well.

"Does the man think I am in love with him?" was Lady Disdain's
inadequate reply.

"No, no, indeed!" he assured her earnestly. "I am not so vain as to
think that, nor so selfish as to wish it; but if for a moment you were
moved----"

"But I was not," said she, stamping her shoe.

His dander began to rise, as they say in the north; but he kept grip
of politeness.

"If you were moved for a moment, Lady Pippinworth," he went on, in a
slightly more determined voice,--"I am far from saying that it was so;
but if----"

"But as I was not----" she said.

It w