nly
thing which I cannot bear. Remember how greatly you are changed, you
are almost a stranger to me in some of your moods. I could not have
you wandering off into worlds of which I knew nothing. Sit down by my
side and talk to me. I will ask no questions. You shall tell me your
own way, and what you wish to leave out--leave it out. Come, is this so
hard a task?"

He seemed frozen into inanition. His face was like the cast of a dead
man's. His voice was cold and hopeless.

"The key," he said, "is gone. I shall never seek for it, I shall never
find it. I have known what madness is, and I am afraid. Shall we go
into the hall? I fancy that they are serving tea."

She looked at him, half terrified, half amazed.

"You mean this as final?" she said, deliberately. "You refuse to offer
any explanation, the explanation which common decency even would require
of these things?"

"I expected too much," he answered. "I know it very well. Forgive me,
and let us forget."

She rose to her feet.

"I do not know that you will ever regret this," she said. "I pray that
you may."

To Brooks she seemed the same charming woman as usual, as he heard her
light laugh come floating across the hall, and bowed over her white
fingers. But Sybil saw the over-bright eyes and nervous mouth and had
hard work to keep back the tears. She piled the cushions about a dark
corner of the divan, and chattered away recklessly.

"This is a night of sorrows," she exclaimed, pouring out the tea. "Mr.
Brooks and I were in the midst of a most affecting leave-taking--when
the tea came. Why do these mundane things always break in upon the most
sacred moments?"

"Life," Lady Caroom said, helping herself recklessly to muffin, "is
such a wonderful mixture of the real and the fanciful, the actual and
the sentimental, one is always treading on the heels of the other. The
little man who turns the handle must have lots of fun."

"If only he has a sense of humour," Brooks interposed. "After all,
though, it is the grisly, ugly things which float to the top. One has
to probe always for the beautiful, and it requires our rarest and most
difficult sense to apprehend the humorous."

Lord Arranmore stirred his tea slowly. His face was like the face of a
carved image. Only Brooks seemed still unconscious of the shadow which
was stalking amongst them.

"We talk of life so glibly," he said. "It is a pity that we cannot
realize its simplest elements. Life is purely sub