hen?" she said, aloud.

"There never was any American," he exclaimed. "Monica is the most
ridiculous gossip, and always sees wrong. If she had not Jack to keep
her from talking so much she would not leave one of us with a rag of
character."

"I will go to-morrow and call there, Hector," Lady Anningford said. "My
cold is sure to be better; and if she is not in, shall I write a note
and ask her to lunch? The husband, too, I suppose?"

"I fear so. Anne, you are a brick."

Then he said good-night, and went to the opera.

Left to herself, Lady Anningford thought: "I suppose she is some flashy,
pretty creature who has caught Hector's fancy, the poor darling. One
never has chanced to find an Australian quite, quite a lady. I almost
wish he would marry Morella and have done with it."

Then she lay on her sofa and pondered many things.

She was a year older than her brother, and they had always been the
closest friends and comrades.

Lady Anningford was more or less a happy and contented woman now, but
there had been moments in her life scorched by passion and infinite
pain. Long ago in the beginning when she first came out she had had the
misfortune to fall in love with Cyril Lamont, married and bad and
attractive. It had given him great pleasure to evade the eye of Lady
Bracondale, pure dragon and strict disciplinarian. Anne was a good girl,
but she was eighteen years old and had tasted no joy. She was not an
easy prey, and her first year had passed in storms of emotion suppressed
to the best of her powers.

The situation had been full of shades and contrasts. The outward, a
strictly guarded lamb, the life of the world and aristocratic propriety;
and the inward, a daily growing mad love for an impossible person,
snatched and secret meetings after tea in country-houses, walks in
Kensington Gardens, rides along lonely lanes out hunting, and, finally,
the brink of complete ruin and catastrophe--but for Hector.

"Where should I be now but for Hector?" her thoughts ran.

Hector was just leaving Eton in those days, and had come up and
discovered matters, while she sobbed in his arms, at the beginning of
her second season. He had comforted her and never scolded a word, and
then he had gone out armed with a heavy hunting-crop, found Cyril
Lamont, and had thrashed the man within an inch of his life. It was one
of Hector's pleasantest recollections, the thought of his cowering form,
his green silk smoking-jacket all torn, a