ck sigh that told of passion held in check.
But she broke away from him, unappeased, and shut herself into her room.

She was relieved to find that a sprinkling of the tea party--the
Ollivers, Norton, and Richardson--had stayed to dinner. Olliver was
her partner; and evinced his appreciation of the fact by chaffing her
laboriously throughout the meal; the one form of conversation she
frankly detested.

But Richardson sat on her right, and, in Olliver's phraseology, "made
the running with her all the time." For good, single-hearted Max
frankly admired her. His conscience pricked him more acutely than it
had yet done at thought of his own responsibility for the wasted years;
and he longed for a chance to say as much to his friend. But Lenox was
not in a mood to talk about his wife; and Richardson got no word in
private with him throughout the evening.

Frank Olliver left early; and as Desmond half-lifted his wife from the
sofa, Quita came up and said good-night also. She had been watching
these two with reawakened interest throughout the afternoon and
evening, and wondering whether she and Eldred could ever arrive at such
perfect community of heart and mind.

In passing her husband, she laid butterfly finger-tips upon his
coat-sleeve. "Good-night, _mon ami_," she said, just framing the words
with her lips: and before he could get a square look at her, she was
gone.

When the three men were left alone, Wyndham drank his 'peg' standing,
and departed; but Desmond took Lenox by the arm.

"Come into the dufta[1] for half an hour," he said. "I've hardly
spoken to you since Monday; and I think we have a thing or two to talk
over."

Lenox submitted with a smile of resigned amusement, and the study door
closed behind them.

[1] Study.

CHAPTER XXIV.

"I dare not swerve
From my soul's rights; a slave, though serving thee.
I but forbear more nobly to deserve;
The free gift only cometh of the free."
--O. Meredith.

"Well, old chap?"

Lenox tried to speak carelessly; to evade the inevitable; for he was
sore, with the twofold soreness of insomnia and thwarted passion; and
when all a man's nerves are laid bare, he naturally dreads a touch in
the wrong place:--hence irascibility. To any one else he would have
presented an impenetrable curtain of reserve, of ironical refusal to
admit that anything was wrong. But Desmond had the man's tenderness,
which is sometimes greater tha