live nearly all the
year round at their country place."

"Of course she doesn't come to London. Why should she? She has a
domestic face. Her home is her world. If she ever does come to town, she
wears a short serge skirt and a blouse with tight sleeves--because she
doesn't know they're coming in again--and takes one of the boys to the
dentist."

"And you can see all that in the porcelain picture?" said Felicity,
laughing.

"More. Far more. And all in your favour."

"But I think you're rather prejudiced, Bertie. You're such a convinced
Londoner yourself that you think every one who lives in the country must
be a paragon of virtue, just as people who live in the country suppose
their London friends to be given up to wickedness and frivolity. Lots of
people have a very good time in the country."

"No one knows that better than I do. I assure you I'm not a bit
prejudiced. I quite believe and realise that people can have a good time
anywhere. Why, even in provincial towns--what was that case at Bradford,
that astonished everybody so much? However, my point is, that Mrs.
Tregelly doesn't."

"Why? I think she looks very happy," said Felicity.

"Yes. Exactly. Happy, but perfectly calm. A woman placed as she is could
not possibly look as calm as that if she had a secret purple romance
with Chetwode, or with any other man. It just shows--if I may say
so--how blind Love is. If this had happened to anybody else, you would
be the first to see, on the face of it, that anything like a flirtation
between the Lady of the Velvet Case and your husband is one of those
hopeless impossibilities that only the wildly imaginative and charming
people who have no relation to real life, like yourself, could possibly
conceive."

Felicity seemed comforted.

"You think it utterly impossible?"

"Oh, I go further than that. I think it highly improbable. Can you see,"
continued Wilton, "this gentle, harmless creature, a woman capable of
having her portrait painted on porcelain, from a photograph, and framed
in crimson velvet, who never in her life had a secret except when she
concealed from her husband her real reason for sending the housemaid
away in order to give the girl another chance by giving her a good
character--can you see _her_, I say, privately slipping this enormous
case into Chetwode's small and reluctant white hand just as she was
going to church, and saying, 'Keep it for my sake'?"

"You make the whole thing so ridiculous,