od up without knowing what she was doing, her heart in her
throat. "How grotesque--how utterly disgusting!"

He gave a slight shrug. "I didn't make the laws...."

"But isn't it too stupid and degrading that such things should be
necessary when two people want to part--?" She broke off again, silenced
by the echo of that fatal "want to part."...

He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legal obligations
involved.

"You haven't yet told me," he suggested, "how you happen to be living
here."

"Here--with the Fulmer children?" She roused herself, trying to catch
his easier note. "Oh, I've simply been governessing them for a few
weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily." She did not say: "It's
because I've parted with Strefford." Somehow it helped her wounded pride
a little to keep from him the secret of her precarious independence.

He looked his wonder. "All alone with that bewildered bonne? But how
many of them are there? Five? Good Lord!" He contemplated the clock with
unseeing eyes, and then turned them again on her face.

"I should have thought a lot of children would rather get on your
nerves."

"Oh, not these children. They're so good to me."

"Ah, well, I suppose it won't be for long."

He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-minded gaze
seemed to reduce to its dismal constituent elements, and added, with an
obvious effort at small talk: "I hear the Fulmers are not hitting it off
very well since his success. Is it true that he's going to marry Violet
Melrose?"

The blood rose to Susy's face. "Oh, never, never! He and Grace are
travelling together now."

"Oh, I didn't know. People say things...." He was visibly embarrassed
with the subject, and sorry that he had broached it.

"Some of the things that people say are true. But Grace doesn't mind.
She says she and Nat belong to each other. They can't help it, she
thinks, after having been through such a lot together."

"Dear old Grace!"

He had risen from his chair, and this time she made no effort to detain
him. He seemed to have recovered his self-composure, and it struck her
painfully, humiliatingly almost, that he should have spoken in that
light way of the expedition to Fontainebleau on the morrow.... Well,
men were different, she supposed; she remembered having felt that once
before about Nick.

It was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: "But wait--wait! I'm not
going to marry Strefford after all!"--but to do so would