become almost her natural manner. It was a habit of his to treat
sportively even the subjects which he reverenced, and in reality she had
sometimes felt him to be less of a sober cynic than herself. He took his
pleasures where he found them, and there was a touch of pathos in the
generous eagerness with which he was ready to provide as well for the
pleasures of others. If he lacked imagination she had learned by now
that he did not fail in its sister virtue, sympathy, and his keen gray
eyes, which expressed so perfectly a gay derision, were not slow, she
knew, to warm into a smiling tenderness.

"Laura is the most earnest creature alive," she said after a moment.

"Is that so? Then I presume she lacks a sense of humour."

"She has a sense of honour at any rate."

With a laugh he settled his figure more comfortably in his chair, and
while she watched the movement, a little fascinated by its easy freedom,
she felt a sudden impulse to reach out and touch his broad, strong
shoulders as she might have touched the shoulders of a statue. Were they
really as hard as bronze, she wondered, or was that suggestion of latent
power, of slumbering energy, as deceptive as the caressing glance he
bent upon her? The glance meant nothing she was aware--he would have
regarded her in much the same way had Perry been at her side, would have
shone quite as affectionately, perhaps, upon her mother. Yet, in spite
of her worldly knowledge, she felt herself yielding to it as to a
delicate flattery. Her eyes were still on him, and presently he caught
her gaze and held it by a look which, for all its fervour, had an edge
of biting irony. There was a meaning, a mystery in his regard, but his
words when at last they came sounded almost empty.

"Oh, that's well enough in its way," he said, "but as a safeguard
there's no virtue alive that can stand against a sense of humour. An
instinct for the ridiculous will keep any man from going to the devil."

She shot her defiant merriment into his face. "Has it kept you?"

"I?--Oh, I wasn't bound that way, you know--but why do you ask?"

For a breath she hesitated, then, remembering her mystification of an
instant ago, she felt a swift desire to punish him for something which
even to herself she could not express--for too sharp a prick of
unsatisfied curiosity, or was it for too intense a moment of
uncertainty?

"Oh, one hears, you know," she replied indifferently.

"One hears! And what is it that on