gusto of four 'At homes' still to be grappled with.

As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his hand.

'No,' she said, with a quick impetuousness, 'no: I want my talk out. It
is barely half-past ten, and neither one of us wants to be racing about
London to-night.'

Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he lingered
rather reluctantly for another ten minutes, as he supposed.

She threw herself into a low chair. The windows were open to the back
of the house, and the roar of Piccadilly and Sloane Street came borne in
upon the warm night air. Her superb dark head stood out against a stand
of yellow lilies close behind her, and the little paroquet, bright with
all the colors of the tropics, perched now on her knee, now on the back
of her chair, touched every now and then by quick unsteady fingers.

Then an incident followed which Elsmere remembered to his dying day with
shame and humiliation.

In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone, a woman who was
five years his senior had made him what was practically a confession of
love--had given him to understand that she know what were the relations
between himself and his wife--and had implored him with the quick breath
of an indescribable excitement to see what a woman's sympathy and a
woman's unique devotion could do for the causes he had at heart.

The truth broke upon Elsmere very slowly, awakening in him, when at last
it was unmistakable, a swift agony of repulsion, which his most friendly
biographer can only regard with a kind of grim satisfaction. For after
all there is an amount of innocence and absentmindedness in matters of
daily human life, which is not only _niaiserie_, but comes very near to
moral wrong. In this crowded world a man has no business to walk about
with his eyes always on the stars. His stumbles may have too many
consequences. A harsh but a salutary truth! If Elsmere needed it, it was
bitterly taught him during a terrible half-hour. When the half-coherent
enigmatical sentences, to which he listened at first with a perplexed
surprise, began gradually to define themselves; when he found a
woman roused and tragically beautiful between him and escape; when no
determination on his part not to understand; when nothing he could say
availed to protect her from her-self; when they were at last face to
face with a confession and an appeal which were a disgrace to both--then
at last Elsmere paid 'in one minute