Lady Loudwater is interesting too?"

"Oh, come! Are you pumping me or merely pulling my leg?" said Mr. Manley.
"Surely you can see that Lady Loudwater is pure Italian Renaissance. She
is one of those subtle, mysterious creatures that Leonardo and Luini were
always painting, compact of emotion."

"It's so long since I was at Balliol, and then I was doing Indian Civil
work--the languages, you know. I've forgotten all I knew about the
Renaissance in Italy, and I don't look at many pictures. All the same, I
think you're wrong--your dramatic imagination, you know. My own idea is
that Lady Loudwater, at any rate, is a quite simple creature."

"It isn't mine," said Mr. Manley firmly. "She's a great deal too
intelligent to be simple, and she comes of far too intelligent a family."

"What family?" said Mr. Flexen.

"She's a Quainton, with Italian blood in her veins."

"The deuce she is!" cried Mr. Flexen, and half a dozen stories of the
Quaintons rose in his mind.

He must amend his impressions of Lady Loudwater.

"And she has a keener sense of humour than any woman I ever came across,"
said Mr. Manley, driving his contention home.

"Has she?" said Mr. Flexen.

There was a pause. Then Mr. Manley said in a musing tone: "Do you suppose
that Colonel Grey finds her simple?"

"What? You don't think that there is really anything serious between
them?" said Mr. Flexen quickly.

"No, not really serious--at any rate, on Colonel Grey's part. You can
hardly expect a man, recovering very slowly from three bad wounds and
still crocked up, to fall in love, can you? Especially a man who, when he
does fall in love, falls in love with the violence with which Grey is
charged," said Mr. Manley.

"There is that," said Mr. Flexen. "But that wouldn't prevent Lady
Loudwater from falling in love with Colonel Grey. And after the way her
husband treated her, she must have needed something in the way of
affection--badly."

"It's no good a woman falling in love with a man unless he falls in love
with her," said Mr. Manley, in the tone of a philosopher. "Besides, women
don't fall in love with men who are so feeble from illness as the Colonel
seems to be. How can there be the attraction? She might, of course, want
to mother him very keenly. But that's quite a different thing." He
paused, then added in a tone of some anxiety: "I say, you're not trying
to mix her up with the murder--if it was a murder?"

"I'm not trying to mix anybody up in i