nce (the least bit overdone).

"_I_ made that marriage," she said, and staggered him.

"Surely," he said, "it was made in heaven."

"If this room is heaven. It was made here, six months ago."

She faced him with all his memories. With all his memories and her
own she faced him radiantly.

"You know now," she said, "_why I did it_. It was worth while,
wasn't it?"

His voice struggled with his memories and stuck. It stuck in his
throat.

Before he left he begged her congratulations on a little affair of
his own; a rather unhappy affair which had ended happily the week
before last. He did not tell her that, if it hadn't been for the
things dear Fanny Brocklebank had done for him, the way she had
mixed herself up with his unhappy little affair, it might have ended
happily a year ago.

"But," said Philippa, "how beautiful!"

He never saw Miss Tarrant again. Their correspondence ceased after
his marriage, and he gathered that she had no longer any use for
him.

APPEARANCES

I

All afternoon since three o'clock he had sat cooling his heels in a
corner of the hotel veranda. And all afternoon he had been a
spectacle of interest to the beautiful cosmopolitan creature who
watched him from her seat under the palm tree in the corresponding
corner.

She had two men with her, and when she was not occupied with one or
both of them she turned her splendid eyes, gaily or solemnly, on
Oscar Thesiger. And every time she turned them Thesiger in his
corner darkened and flushed and bit his moustache and twirled it,
while his eyes answered hers as he believed they meant him to
answer. Oscar Thesiger was not a cosmopolitan himself for nothing.

And all the time while he looked at her he was thinking, thinking
very miserably, of little Vera Walters.

She had refused him yesterday evening without giving any reason.

Her cruelty (if it wasn't cruelty he'd like to know what it was)
remained unexplained, incomprehensible to Oscar Thesiger.

For, if she didn't mean to marry him, why on earth had they asked
him to go abroad with them? Why had they dragged him about with them
for five weeks, up and down the Riviera? Why was he there now,
cooling his heels in the veranda of the Hotel Mediterranee, Cannes?
That was where the cruelty, the infernal cruelty came in.

And her reasons--if she had only given him her reasons. It was all
he asked for. But of course she hadn't any.

What possible reason could she have? It wasn't