e acknowledged hangers-on? Was there no other
possible solution, no new way of ordering their lives? No--there
was none: he could not picture Susy out of her setting of luxury and
leisure, could not picture either of them living such a life as the Nat
Fulmers, for instance! He remembered the shabby untidy bungalow in
New Hampshire, the slatternly servants, uneatable food and ubiquitous
children. How could he ask Susy to share such a life with him? If he
did, she would probably have the sense to refuse. Their alliance had
been based on a moment's midsummer madness; now the score must be
paid....

He decided to write. If they were to part he could not trust himself to
see her. He called a waiter, asked for pen and paper, and pushed aside
a pile of unread newspapers on the corner of the table where his coffee
had been served. As he did so, his eye lit on a Daily Mail of two days
before. As a pretext for postponing his letter, he took up the paper and
glanced down the first page. He read:

"Tragic Yachting Accident in the Solent. The Earl of Altringham and
his son Viscount d'Amblay drowned in midnight collision. Both bodies
recovered."

He read on. He grasped the fact that the disaster had happened the
night before he had left Venice and that, as the result of a fog in
the Solent, their old friend Strefford was now Earl of Altringham, and
possessor of one of the largest private fortunes in England. It was
vertiginous to think of their old impecunious Streff as the hero of such
an adventure. And what irony in that double turn of the wheel which, in
one day, had plunged him, Nick Lansing, into nethermost misery, while it
tossed the other to the stars!

With an intenser precision he saw again Susy's descent from the gondola
at the calle steps, the sound of her laughter and of Strefford's chaff,
the way she had caught his arm and clung to it, sweeping the other men
on in her train. Strefford--Susy and Strefford!... More than once, Nick
had noticed the softer inflections of his friend's voice when he spoke
to Susy, the brooding look in his lazy eyes when they rested on her. In
the security of his wedded bliss Nick had made light of those signs. The
only real jealousy he had felt had been of Fred Gillow, because of his
unlimited power to satisfy a woman's whims. Yet Nick knew that such
material advantages would never again suffice for Susy. With Strefford
it was different. She had delighted in his society while he was
notori