revel in plain speaking for once, and to see how she would bear it.

"He said you were an egoist, that you were fine enough in your brilliant
selfishness to stand quite alone--"

A faint smile moved the narrow corners of her lips at the last words. He
went on.

"--That your ideal of a real man, the sort of man a woman loses her head
for, was--"

He stopped. Carey's description of the Lord Holme and Leo Ulford type
had not been very delicate.

"Was--?" she said, with insistence. "Was--?"

Robin thought how she had hurt him, and said:

"Carey said, a huge mass of bones, muscles, thews, sinews, that cares
nothing for beauty."

"Beauty! That doesn't care for beauty! But then--?"

"Carey meant--yes, I'm sure Carey meant real beauty."

"What do you mean by 'real beauty'?"

"An inner light that radiates outward, but whose abiding-place is
hidden--perhaps. But one can't say. One can only understand and love."

"Oh. And Mr. Carey said that. Was he--was he at all that evening as he
was at Arkell House? Was he talking nonsense or was he serious?"

"Difficult to say! But he was not as he was at Arkell House. Which knows
you best--Carey or I?"

"Neither of you. I don't know myself."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. The only thing I know is that you can't tell me what to
do."

"No, I can't."

"But perhaps I can tell you."

She put down her cup and looked at him with a sort of grave kindness
that he had never seen in her face before.

"What to do?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn't there. Perhaps it
doesn't exist. And if it does--perhaps it's a poor, feeble thing that's
no good to me, no good to me."

Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on
them and began to cry gently.

Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her
in an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the
window.

She was crying for Fritz.

That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from
the heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her
existence, showed that she could love.

CHAPTER XII

AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley
concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many
people, accepting the American's cleverness as a fashionable fact, also
accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious,
and credi