nothing to do with the Professor
or with a letter, or was there a more present reason? Had Cora Lutworth
attracted him with her youth and high spirits? They were walking ahead
now, and she could hear his laugh and see how they were enjoying
themselves.

She had been a perfect fool to ask Cora. She did not fear a single
Englishwoman, the powers of most of whom in her heart she despised--but
Cora was of her own race, and well equipped to rival her in a question
of marriage. Cora was only twenty-one, and she herself was thirty--and
there was the divorce which, although she had found it no bar to her
entrance into the most exclusive English society, still might perhaps
rankle unconsciously in the mind of a man mounting the political ladder,
and determined to secure the highest honors.

She felt she hated Cora, and would have destroyed her with a look if she
had been able.

Miss Lutworth, meanwhile, brimful of the joy of life and _insouciance_,
was amusing herself vastly. And John Derringham was experiencing that
sense of relaxation and irresponsible pleasure he got sometimes when he
was overworked from going to an excruciatingly funny Paris farce. Miss
Lutworth did not appeal to his brain at all, although she was quite
capable of doing so; she just made him feel gay and frolicsome with her
deliciously _ruse_ view of the world and life in general. He forgot his
ruffled temper of the morning, and by the time they had returned for
tea, was his brilliant self again, and quite ready to sit in a low chair
at his hostess's side, while she leaned back among the cushions of her
sofa, in her own sitting-room, whither she had enticed him during that
nondescript hour before dinner, when each person could do what he
pleased.

"Is not Cora sweet?" she said, smoothing the brocade beneath her hand.
Her sitting-room had been arranged by the artist who had done the house,
as a perfect bower of Italian Sixteenth Century art. Mr. Jephson, the
artist, had assured her that this period would make a perfect background
for her fresh and rather voluptuous coloring; it had not become so
_banal_ as any of the French Louis'. And so Arabella had been instructed
to drum into her head the names of the geniuses of that time, and their
works, and she could now babble sweetly all about Giorgione, Paolo
Veronese and Titian's later works without making a single mistake. And
while the pictures bored her unspeakably, she took a deep pleasure in
her own cle