, to take any share in it.

'Well, I believe the story about Desforets is true,' said the
fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, lolling
back in his chair.

Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in the English
rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon her.

'If you got it from _The Ferret_, my dear Evershed,' said the ex-Tory
minister, Lord Rupert, 'you may put it down as a safe lie. As for me, I
believe she has a much shrewder eye to the main chance.'

'What do you mean?' said the other, raising astonished eyebrows.

'Well, it doesn't _pay_, you know, to write yourself down a fiend--not
quite.'

'What--you think it will affect her audiences? Well, that is a good
joke!' and the young man laughed immoderately joined by several of the
other guests.

'I don't imagine it will make any difference to you, my good friend,'
returned Lord Rupert imperturbably; 'but the British public haven't got
your nerve. They may take it awkwardly--I don't say they will--when a
woman who has turned her own young sister out of doors at night, in St.
Petersburg, so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies--comes to
ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.'

'What has one to do with an actress' private life, my dear Lord Rupert?'
asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping with a smooth clearness
into the conversation, her eyes darting light from under straight black
brows.

'What indeed!' said the young man who had begun the conversation, with
a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching his hand for another
cigarette, and drawing it back out with a look under his drooped
eyelids--a look of cold impertinent scrutiny--at Catherine Elsmere.

'Ah! well--I don't want to be obtrusively moral--Heaven Forbid! But
there is such a thing as destroying the illusion to such an extent that
you injure your pocket. Desforets is doing it--doing it actually in
Paris too.'

There was a ripple of laughter.

'Paris and illusions--_O mon Dieu!_' groaned young, Evershed, when he
had done laughing, laying meditative hands on his knees and gazing into
the fire.

'I tell you I have seen it,' said Lord Rupert, waxing combative, and
slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. 'The last time I went
to see Desforets in Paris the theatre was crammed, and the
house--theatrically speaking--_ice_. They received her in dead,
silence--they gave her not one single recall--and they