m than all the intensity
of her own affection.

* * * * *

Victoria's mind for the rest of the sitting was in a state of
abstraction, and she sat so still that Delorme was greatly pleased with
her. At luncheon she was still absent-minded, and Lady Barbara whispered
in Gerald Tatham's ear that Victoria was always a poor hostess, but this
time her manners were really impossible.

"But you intend to stay a fortnight, don't you?" said Gerald, not without
malice.

"If I can possibly stay it out." The reply was lofty, but the situation,
as Gerald knew, was commonplace. Lady Barbara's house in town was let for
another fortnight, and Duddon's Castle was more agreeable and more
economical than either lodgings or a hotel.

Meanwhile a pair of eyes belonging to the young man whose dinner jacket
and black tie had marked him out amid the other male guests of the night
before were observing matters with a more subtle and friendly spirit
behind them. Cyril Boden was a Fellow of All Souls, a journalist, an
advanced Radical, a charmer, and a fanatic. He hated no man. That indeed
was the truth. But he hated the theories and the doings of so many men,
that the difference between him and the mere revolutionary was hard to
seize. He had a smooth and ruddy face, in which the eyebrows seemed to be
always rising interrogatively; longish hair; stooping shoulders, and an
amiable, lazy, mocking look that belied a nature of singular passion,
always occupied with the most tremendous problems of life, and afraid of
no solution.

He had been overworking himself in the attempt to settle a dock strike,
and had come to Duddon to rest. Victoria was much attached to him in a
motherly way, and he to her. They sparred a good deal; she attacking
"agitators" and "demagogues," he, fierce on "feudal tyranny," especially
when masked in the beauties and amenities of such a place as Duddon. But
they were friends all the same, exchanging the unpaid services of
friends.

In the afternoon, before Lydia Penfold appeared, Boden found amusement
in teasing Delorme--an old acquaintance. Delorme was accustomed to pose
in all societies as Whistler's lawful and only successor. "Pattern" and
"harmony" possessed him; "finish" was only made for fools, and the
story-teller in art was the unclean thing. His ambition, like Whistler's,
was to paint a full length in three days, and hear it hailed a
masterpiece. And, like Whistler, he had no so