are bounded by the coming night or
the coming years. For five minutes, then, a paradise--of oyster stew."

"It is distinctly the best oyster stew I have ever tasted in my life,"
he pronounced a few minutes later.

"It is very good indeed," she assented. "Now your turn comes. Go to
the sideboard and bring me something. Remember that I am hungry and
don't forget the salad. And tell me, incidentally, whether you have
heard anything of a rumour going around about Andrew Tallente?"

He served her and himself and resumed his seat.

"A rumour?" he repeated. "No, I have heard nothing. What sort of a
rumour?"

"A vague but rather persistent one," she replied. "They say that it is
in the power of certain people--to drive him out of political life at
any moment."

Dartrey's smile was sufficiently contemptuous but there was a note of
anxiety in his tone which he could not altogether conceal.

"These canards are very absurd, Nora," he declared. "The politician is
the natural quarry of the blackmailer, but I should think no man of my
acquaintance has lived a more blameless life than Andrew Tallente."

"I will tell you in what form the story came to me," she said. "It was
from a journalist on the staff of one of our great London dailies. The
rumour was that they had been indirectly approached to know if they
would pay a large sum for a story, perfectly printable, but which would
drive Tallente out of political life."

"Do you know the name of the newspaper?" he asked eagerly.

"I was told," Nora answered, "but under the most solemn abjuration of
secrecy. You ought to be able to guess it, though. Then a woman whom I
met in the Lyceum Chub this afternoon asked me outright if there was any
truth in certain rumours about Tallente, so people must be talking about
it."

The cloud lingered on Dartrey's face. He ate and drank in his usual
sparing fashion, silently and apparently wrapped in thought. From the
other side of the pink-shaded lamp which stood in the middle of the
table, Nora watched him with a curious, almost a sardonic sadness in her
clear eyes. An hour ago she had looked at herself in the mirror and had
been startled at what she saw. The lines of her black gown, the most
extravagant purchase of her life, had revealed the beauty of her soft
and shapely figure. Her throat and bosom had seemed so dazzlingly
white, her hair so rich and glossy, her eyes full of the hope, the
softness, almost the anticipatory joy of the w