able in a
fashionable but somewhat Bohemian restaurant. Both had been in the
humour for reminiscences, and they had outstayed most of their
neighbours.

"I wonder what people really think of us," Violet remarked pensively. "I
told Lady Amershal, when she asked us to go there this evening, that we
always dined together alone somewhere once a week, and she absolutely
refused to believe me. 'With your own husband, my dear?' she kept on
repeating."

"Her ladyship's tastes are more catholic," the baron declared dryly.
"Yet, after all, Violet, the real philosophy of married life demands
something of this sort."

Violet smiled and fingered her pearls for a minute.

"What the real philosophy of married life may be I do not know," she
said, "but I am perfectly content with our rendering of it. What a
fortunate thing, Peter, with your intensely practical turn of mind, that
Nature endowed you with so much sentiment."

De Grost gazed reflectively at the cigarette which he had just selected
from his case.

"Well," he remarked, "there have been times when I have cursed myself
for a fool, but, on the whole, sentiment keeps many fires burning."

She leaned towards him and dropped her voice a little.

"Tell me," she begged, "do you ever think of the years we spent together
in the country? Do you ever regret?"

He smiled thoughtfully.

"It is a hard question, that," he admitted. "There were days there which
I loved, but there were days, too, when the restlessness came--days when
I longed to hear the hum of the city and to hear men speak whose words
were of life and death and the great passions. I am not sure, Violet,
whether, after all, it is well for one who has lived to withdraw
absolutely from the thrill of life."

She laughed softly but gaily.

"I am with you," she declared, "absolutely. I think that the fairies
must have poured into my blood the joy of living for its own sake. I
should be an ungrateful woman indeed if I found anything to complain of
nowadays. Yet there is one thing that sometimes troubles me," she went
on, after a moment's pause.

"And that?" he asked.

"The danger," she said slowly. "I do not want to lose you, Peter. There
are times when I am afraid."

De Grost flicked the ash from his cigarette.

"The days are passing," he remarked, "when men point revolvers at one
another, and hire assassins to gain their ends. Now it is more a battle
of wits. We play chess on the board of life still, but we