sly beyond his reach. The thing that
troubled him was the knowledge of his own impetuous emotions--with the
shield of Madame Alta withdrawn was it not possible that a sudden
passion might plunge him headlong even into the abyss of marriage?

"What a consummate, what an unteachable ass I am," he thought as he
stared moodily at the passing cabs, "and the odd part of it is that the
newest attraction always brings with it a fatal belief in its own
permanence. I have been madly in love a dozen times since I left college
and yet it seems impossible to me that what I now feel has ever had a
beginning or can ever have an end. By Jove, I could almost swear that
I've never gone through this before." Then he remembered suddenly one of
Laura's most characteristic movements--the swift turn of her profile as
she averted her face--and he tried to imagine the quickened sensation
with which he might have stooped and kissed the little violet shadow on
her neck. "Pshaw!" he exclaimed with angry determination, "does a man
never get too old for such rubbish? Am I no better than one of the
dotards who hold on to passion after they have lost their teeth?" But in
spite of his contemptuous cynicism it seemed to him that he was more in
earnest than he had ever been in his life before. There had been nothing
so grave--nothing so destructive as this in the impulse which had driven
him to Madame Alta.

Gerty was awaiting him alone in her sitting-room upstairs, and as he
entered, she stretched out her hands with a gesture of reproachful
eagerness.

"You're so late that I've barely a half hour before dressing," she said.

"Why, in heaven's name, didn't you write me sooner?" he enquired, as he
threw himself into a chair beside the couch on which she lay half buried
amid cushions of pale green satin, "it was a mere accident that I had
this spare time on my hands. Where's Perry?"

She shook her head with the piquant disdain he knew so well. "Amusing
himself doubtless," she replied, adding with one of her uncontrollable
flashes of impulse, "Do you, by the way, I wonder, ever happen to see
Ada Lawley now?"

The question startled him, and he sat for a minute staring under bent
brows at her indignant loveliness; though she had shrieked out her
secret in the tongues of men and of angels, she could have added nothing
further to his knowledge. The wonderful child quality which still
survived in her beneath all her shallow worldliness dawned suddenly in