ll me up, then! I am much too comfortable to move unaided."

She sprang to her feet lightly enough, and for a moment he kept her
hands, which rested willingly enough in his. They looked at one another
in silence. Then she laughed.

"My dear Arranmore," she protested, "I am not made up half carefully
enough to stand such a critical survey by daylight. Your north windows
are too terrible."

"Not to you, dear lady," he answered, smiling. "I was wondering whether
it was possible that you could be forty-one."

"You brute," she exclaimed, with uplifted eyebrows. "How dare you?
Forty if you like--for as long as you like. Forty is the fashionable
age, but one year over that is fatal. Don't you know that now-a-days a
woman goes straight from forty to sixty? It is such a delicious long
rest. And besides, it gives a woman an object in life which she has
probably been groping about for all her days. One is never bored after
forty."

"And the object?"

"To keep young, of course. There's scope for any amount of ingenuity.
Since that dear man in Paris has hit upon the real secret of enamelling,
we are thinking of extending the limit to sixty-five. Lily Cestigan is
seventy-one, you know, and she told me only last week that Mat
Harlowe--you know Harlowe, he's rather a nice boy, in the Guards had
asked her to run away with him. She's known him three months, and he's
seen her at least three times by daylight. She's delighted about it."

"And is she going?" Arranmore asked.

"Well, I'm not sure that she'd care to risk that," Lady Caroom answered,
thoughtfully. "She told him she'd think about it, and, meanwhile, he's
just as devoted as ever."

They crossed the great stone hall together--the hall which, with its
wonderful pillars and carved dome, made Enton the show-house of the
county. Arranmore's study was a small octagonal room leading out from
the library. A fire of cedar logs was burning in an open grate, and he
wheeled up an easy-chair for her close to his writing-table.

"I wonder," she remarked, thoughtfully, "what you think of Syd
Molyneux?"

"Is there anything--to be thought about him?" he answered, lighting a
cigarette.

"He's rather that way, isn't he?" she assented. "I mean for Sybil, you
know."

"I should let Sybil decide," he answered.

"She probably will," Lady Caroom said. "Still, she's horribly bored at
having to be dragged about to places, you know, and that sort of thing,
just because she isn't married,