ess warmth hardly
tempered.

"My husband is no artist," Karen answered.

It was from her tone rather than from Gregory's that Herr Lippheim
seemed to receive his intimation; he was a little disconcerted; he could
interpret Karen's tones. "Ach so! Ach so!" he said; but, his good-will
still seeking to find its way to the polished and ambiguous person who
had gained Karen's heart,--"But now you will live amongst artists, Mr.
Jardine, and you will hear music, great music, played to you by the
greatest. So you will come to feel it in the heart." And as Gregory, to
this, made no reply, "You will educate him, Karen; is it not so? With
you and the great Tante, how could it be otherwise?"

"I am afraid that one cannot create the love of art when it is not
there, Franz," Karen returned. She was neither plaintive nor confiding;
yet there was an edge in her voice which Gregory felt and which, he
knew, he was intended to feel. Karen was angry with him.

"Have you seen Belot's portrait of Tante, yet, Franz?"--she again
excluded her husband;--"It is just finished."

Herr Lippheim had seen it only that morning and he repeated, but now in
preoccupied tones, "_Kolossal_!"

They talked, and Gregory stood above them, aloof from their conversation
frigidly gazing over the company, his elbow in his hand, his neat
fingers twisting his moustache. If he was giving Madame von Marwitz a
handle against him he couldn't help it. Over the heads of Karen and Herr
Lippheim his eyes for a moment encountered hers. They looked at each
other steadily and neither feigned a smile.

Eleanor Scrotton arrived at six, flushed and flustered.

"Thank heaven, I haven't missed her!" she said to Gregory, to whom,
to-day, Eleanor was an almost welcome sight. Her eyes had fixed
themselves on Mlle. Mauret. "Have you had a talk with her yet?"

"I haven't had a talk and I yield my claim to you," said Gregory. "Are
you very eager to meet the lady?"

"Who wouldn't be, my dear Gregory! What a wonderful face! What thought
and suffering! Oh, it has been the most extraordinary of stories. You
don't know? Well, I will tell you about her some time. She is,
doubtless, one of the greatest living actresses. And she is still quite
young. Barely forty."

He watched Eleanor make her way to the actress's side, reflecting
sardonically upon the modern growths of British tolerance. Half the
respectable matrons in London would, no doubt, take their girls to see
_La Gaine d'Or_