aire_ sauter!"' said Sir John, mincing out
his pun as though he loved it.

'Not bad, Sir John,' she said, looking at him calmly, 'but you have way
to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to dinner,
that positively----'

'You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the "Societe de
Londres,"' he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might have seen
an angry flash in his little eyes. 'My dear Lady Aubrey, it was
simply because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education had been
neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The last time but
one we meet, you gave me the cream of three new French novels and all
the dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. By the
way, have you read the "Princesse de----"'

He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.

'I haven't,' she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed a
rapier-glance at him, 'but if I had, I should say precisely the same.
Lord Rupert will you kindly keep Sir John in order?'

Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion
characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern
gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The casual
spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge _mot_, invariably assumed that
all 'the time he could spare from neglecting his duties he must spend in
adorning his person.' Not at all! The _tenue_ of a dandy was never more
cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of
a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in reality
going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very soon to be on the top
rungs.

It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain stratum
of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own
conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the
other end of the table, or when the party became fused into one for a
while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of
a personal skirmish, the whole scene--the dainty oval room, the lights,
the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver,
the tapestried wall--would seem to him for an instant like a mirage,
a dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream
never has.

The hard self-confidence of these people--did it belong to the same
world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had shone
on him t