" said the Contessa, who shook her head, yet
smiled with sympathy. "You must not say to these messieurs below that
you have been in my room. Oh, I know the confidences of a smoking-room!
You must not brag, _mes amis_. For Bice does not understand the
_convenances_, nor remember that this is England, where people meet only
in the drawing-room."

"Divine forgetfulness!" murmured Derwentwater. Jock, for his part,
turned his back with a certain sense of shame. He had liked it, but he
had not thought it right. The room altogether, with its draperies and
mysteries, had conveyed to him a certain intoxication as of wrong-doing.
Something that was dangerous was in the air of it. It was seductive, it
was fascinating; he had felt like a man banished when Bice had started
from the piano and bidden them "Go away; go away!" in the same laughing
tone in which she had bidden them come. But the moment he was outside
the threshold his impulse was to escape--to rush out of sight--and
obliterate even from his own mind the sense that he had been there. To
meet the Contessa, and still more his sister, full in the face, was a
shock to all his susceptibilities. He turned his back upon them, and but
that his fellow-culprit made a momentary stand, would have fled away.
Lucy partook of Jock's feeling. It wounded her to see him at that door.
She gave him a glance of mingled reproach and pity; a vague sense that
these were siren-women dangerous to all mankind stole into her heart.

But Lucy was destined to a still greater shock. The party from the
smoking-room was late in breaking up. The sound of their steps and
voices as they came upstairs roused Lady Randolph, not from sleep--for
she had been unable to sleep--but from the confused maze of
recollections and efforts to think which distracted her placid soul. She
was not made for these agitations. The constitution of her mind was
overset altogether. The moment that suspicion and distrust came in there
was no further strength in her. She was lying not thinking so much as
remembering stray words and looks which drifted across her memory as
across a dim mirror, with a meaning in them which she did not grasp. She
was not clever. She could not put this and that together with the
dolorous skill which some women possess. It is a skill which does not
promote the happiness of the possessor, but perhaps it is scarcely more
happy to stand in the midst of a vague mass of suggestions without being
able to make