ny, give me war!"

"Perhaps you would prefer dinner first," Paliser, with recovered calm,
replied.

Wouldn't she, though! Now that she was definitely dished, hunger again
bit at her and she accompanied Paliser through the dim hall, through the
music-room, through the long suite, into the dining-room where, as
before, three men, with white sensual faces, stood waiting.

Paliser motioned. "Mrs. Paliser will sit there. Move the other chair
here." He drew a seat for her and gave additional instructions. "There
will be people here to-morrow. If we are motoring, have them wait."

"What people?" asked Cassy, before whom an uncomfortable vision of her
father and Ma Tamby jumped.

Paliser replied in French. "A man and a woman or two from Fifth Avenue."

I wonder where that bundle is, thought Cassy who said: "A man? What
man?"

"Oh, just a clerk. That is almond soup. Do you care for it?" He looked
down at his plate which appeared to engross him.

Cassy raised her spoon. "A penny for your thoughts."

He looked up. "They are worth far more. I was thinking of the night I
first met you."

Cassy laughed. "And Ma Tamby's ham and eggs?"

Paliser, raising his own spoon, added: "It was Lennox who introduced us.
You knew he was engaged to Miss Austen? Well, she has broken it."

Cassy must have swallowed the soup the wrong way. She coughed, lifted
her napkin and saw a road, long, dark, infinitely fatiguing on which she
was lost. But the soup adjusted itself, the road turned to the right.
Lennox had never so much as said boo! In anger at herself she rubbed her
mouth hard and put the napkin down.

Paliser, who had been tasting and sniffing at a glass, looked at the
butler. "What is this? Take it away. It is not fit for a convict." He
looked over at Cassy. "I am sorry."

"One gets so bored with good wine," said Cassy, who recently had been
reading Disraeli. Yet she said it absently, the unscrambled eggs about
her.

But the saying was new to Paliser, to whom few things were. He relished
it accordingly and the more particularly because of its fine flavour of
high-bred insolence.

From where he sat, he eyed her. Although she was eating, which is never
a very engaging occupation, her face had an air that was noble and
reserved. At the moment, a scruple in which there was a doubt, presented
itself. In view of the coming draft act, it occurred to him that he
might have gone the wrong way about it. But the scruple concerned merely