seem by contrast a bounder and an outsider. But the fact which
had in the secret places of her small mind been the fly in her
ointment--the one fact that he had never for a moment cared a straw for
her--caused her actually to hate him as he again made it, quite without
prejudice, crystal clear. It was true that he had more than kept his
word--that he had never broken a convention in his bearing towards
her--that in his rigid way he had behaved like a prince--but she had
been dirt under his feet--she had been dirt under his feet! She wanted
to rave like a fishwife--though there were no fishwives in Mayfair.

It was at this very moment of climax that a sudden memory beset her.

"Rob always said that if a woman who was pretty could see a man often
enough--again and again--he couldn't _help_ himself--unless there _was_
some one else!"

Her last words were fiercely accusing. She quite glared at him a few
seconds, her chest heaving pantingly.

She suddenly sprang from her sofa and dashed towards a table where a
pile of photographs lay in an untidy little heap. She threw them about
with angrily shaking hands until at last she caught at one and brought
it back to him.

"There _was_ some one else," she laughed shrilly. "You were in love with
that creature."

It was one of the photographs of Alixe such as the Bond Street shop had
shown in its windows.

She made a movement as if to throw it into the grate and he took it from
her hand, saying nothing whatever.

"I'd forgotten about it until Owen Delamore reminded me only yesterday,"
she said. "He's a romantic thing and he heard that you had been in
attendance and had been sent to their castle in Germany. He worked the
thing out in his own way. He said you had chosen me because I was like
her. I can see now! I _was_ like her!"

"If you had been like her," his voice was intensely bitter, "I should
have asked you to be my wife. You are as unlike her as one human being
can be to another."

"But I was enough like her to make you take me up!" she cried furiously.

"I have neither taken you up nor put you down," he answered. "Be good
enough never to refer to the subject again."

"I'll refer to any subject I like. If you think I shall not you are
mistaken. It will be worth talking about. An Early Victorian romance is
worth something in these days."

The trend of her new circle had indeed carried her far. He was privately
appalled by her. She was hysterically, passionately s