dear man. He came
on here with us, and he is now, I believe, greeting acquaintances
everywhere in the Promenade. I am perfectly convinced that I shall have
to look the other way when we go out."

"I think I'll see whether I can rescue him," Norgate remarked. "Good
show, isn't it?" he added, turning to her companion.

"Capital," replied Baring, without enthusiasm. "Too many people
here, though."

Norgate strolled on, and Mrs. Benedek tapped her companion on the
knuckles with her fan.

"How dared you be so rude!" she exclaimed. "You are in a very bad humour
this evening. I can see that I shall have to punish you."

"That's all very well," Baring grumbled, "but it gets more difficult to
see you alone every day. This evening was to have been mine. Now this fat
German turns up and lays claim to you, and then, about the first moment
we've had a chance to talk, Norgate comes gassing along. You're not
nearly as nice to me, Bertha, as you used to be."

"My dear man," she protested, "in the first place I deny it. In the
second, I ask myself whether you are quite as devoted to me as you were
when you first came."

"In what way?" he demanded.

She turned her wonderful eyes upon him.

"At first when you came," she declared, "you told me everything. You
spoke of your long mornings and afternoons at the Admiralty. You told me
of the room in which you worked, the men who worked there with you. You
told me of the building of that little model, and how you were all
allowed to try your own pet ideas with regard to it. And then, all of a
sudden, nothing--not a word about what you have been doing. I am an
intelligent woman. I love to have men friends who do things, and if they
are really friends of mine, I like to enter into their life, to know of
their work, to sympathise, to take an interest in it. It was like that
with you at first. Now it has all gone. You have drawn down a curtain. I
do not believe that you go to the Admiralty at all. I do not believe that
you have any wonderful invention there over which you spend your time."

"Bertha, dear," he remonstrated, "do be reasonable."

She shrugged her shoulders.

"But am I not? See how reasonably I have spoken to you. I have told you
the exact truth. I have told you why I do not take quite that same
pleasure in your company as when you first came."

"Do consider," he begged. "I spoke to you freely at first because we had
not reached the stage in the work when secrecy was ab