enough." She turned suddenly
on May. "You talked to him for nearly an hour the other night," she
said.

"Yes--how you could!" sighed Fanny.

"I couldn't help it. He talked to me."

"About those great schemes that he's filled poor dear Dick's head with?
Not that I doubt he's got plenty of schemes--of a sort you know."

"He didn't talk schemes," said Lady May. "He was worse than that."

"What did he do?" asked her sister.

"Flirted."

A sort of gasp broke from Lady Richard's lips; she gazed helplessly at
her friends. Fanny began to laugh. May preserved a meditative
seriousness; she seemed to be reviewing Quisante's efforts in a judicial
spirit.

"Well?" said Lady Richard after the proper pause.

"Oh well, he was atrocious, of course," May admitted; her tone, however,
expressed a reluctant homage to truth rather than any resentment. "He
doesn't know how to do it in the least."

"He doesn't know how to do anything," Lady Richard declared.

"Most men are either elephantine or serpentine," said Fanny. "Which was
he, dear?"

"I don't think either."

"Porcine?" asked Lady Richard.

"No. I haven't got an animal for him. Well, yes, he was a little
weaselly perhaps. But----" She glanced at Lady Richard as she paused,
and then appeared to think that she would say no more; she frowned
slightly and then smiled.

"I like his cheek!" exclaimed Fanny with a simplicity that had survived
the schoolroom.

Lady Richard screwed her small straight features into wrinkles of
disgust and a shrug seemed to run all over her little trim
smartly-gowned figure; no presumption could astonish her in Quisante.

"Why in the world did you listen to him, May?" Fanny went on.

"He interested me. And every now and then he was objectionable in rather
an original way."

With another shrug, inspired this time by her friend's mental vagaries,
Lady Richard diverged to another point.

"And that was where you were all the time Weston Marchmont was looking
for you?" she asked.

May began to laugh. "Somehow I'm generally somewhere else when Mr.
Marchmont looks for me," she said. "It isn't deliberate, really; I like
him very much, but when he comes near me, some perverse fate seems to
set my legs moving in the opposite direction."

"Well, Alexander Quisante's a perverse fate, if you like," said Lady
Richard.

"It's curious how there are people one's like that towards. You're very
fond of them, but it seems quite certain that you'll nev