obs, the Oh! Oh's!, the What will become of me?, the usual
run up and down the scale and the usual remedies which a bank account
supplies. He had expected all that. He had prescribed for it often.
There was not a symptom for which he did not know the proper dose and
just when to administer it. But barely had he crossed the threshold
before he realised that all his science would be in default.

Cassy presented an entirely new case, but, fortunately, in the drink
which she had served, he saw or thought he saw how to treat it.

He gestured again. "I never cared for scenes. But this house, which it
has pleased you to describe from your knowledge of other establishments,
is----"

Whatever he may have intended to add, was interrupted. Cassy, previously
inexorable as fate, but converted then into a fury, dropped the bundle
and caught up the vase. Missing him, it hit the door, where musically it
crashed and shattered.

He turned, looked at it, looked at her, at the table. Barring the
gold-backed brushes, the jade platter and that bundle, there was nothing
that she could conveniently shy, and, in his Oxford voice, but civilly
enough, he gave it to her.

"Allow me. There is no necessity whatever for your acting in this
manner. The situation, such as it is, it had been my intention to
remedy. It had been my intention, I say. But yesterday it came to my
knowledge that it is because of your relations with Lennox that his
engagement is broken."

Take that, he mentally added and continued aloud: "I might not have
believed the story, but I was told that Lennox admitted it." Take that,
too, he mentally resumed. I shall be treated to tears in a minute and in
no time it will be "Kamerad!"

Sidewise he looked at the ruin of the vase, on which Daughters of Heaven
and an ablated dynasty may have warmed their eyes. It affronted his own.
Insult, yes, that could be tossed about, but not art, not at least the
relatively unique.

With a crease in his lips which now were dry no longer, he looked at
Cassy. The awaited tears were not yet visible. But the blood-madness
that had seized her, must have let her go, routed, as haematomania may
be, by the trivial and, in this instance, by a lie. That lie suffocated
her. It was as though, suddenly, she had been garroted.

The condition was only momentary, but, during it, a curtain fell on this
vulgar drama, which was to affect so many lives. Before the girl a
panorama passed. She saw herself leav