t for once I'd act--defy authority, risk
landing myself in a worse mess than ever, and give Decies his chance.
And I tell you he really is a charming chap, a gentleman, you know, and
a nice, clean-minded, decent fellow--not like me, not a bit. He's
awfully hard hit too, and would be as steady as old time for poor
little Con's sake if----"

"Ah! now I begin to comprehend," Honoria said.

"Yes, don't you see, it's a perfectly genuine, for-ever-and-ever-amen
sort of business."

Lord Shotover leaned back once more, and turned a wonderfully pleasant,
if not preeminently responsible, countenance upon his companion.

"I never went in for that kind of racket myself, Miss St. Quentin," he
continued. "Not being conspicuously faithful, I should only have made a
_fiasco_ of it. But I give you my word it touches me all the same when
I do run across it. I think it's awfully lucky for a man to be made
that way. And Decies is. So there seemed no help for it. I had to chuck
discretion, as I told you, and give him his chance."

He paused, and then asked with a somewhat humorous air of
self-depreciation:--"What do you think now, have I done more harm than
good, made confusion worse confounded, and played the fool generally?"

But again Honoria vouchsafed him no immediate reply. The meditative
mood still held her, and the present conversation offered much food for
meditation. Her companion's confession of faith in true love, if you
had the good fortune to be born that way, had startled her. That the
speaker enjoyed the reputation of being something of a profligate lent
singular point to that confession. She had not expected it from Lord
Shotover, of all men. And, as coming from him, the sentiment was in a
high degree arresting and interesting. Her own ideals, so far, had a
decidedly anti-matrimonial tendency, while being in love appeared to
her a much overrated, if not actively objectionable, condition.
Personally she hoped to escape all experience of it. Then her thought
traveled back to Lady Calmady,--the charm of her personality, her
sorrows, her splendid self-devotion, and to the object of that
devotion--namely, Richard Calmady, a being of strange contrasts, at
once maimed and beautiful, a being from whom she--Honoria--shrank in
instinctive repulsion, while unwillingly acknowledging that he
exercised a permanent and intimate fascination over her imagination.
She dwelt, in quick pity, too, upon the frightened, wide-eyed, childish