intment."

"Well, the war's been such a mix-up that seven men out of ten will
change their careers, when they come back. . . . Babs . . . do you care
for Jack as much as that?"

She looked up quickly with a gleam of hope in her eyes.

"Are you going to--forget my promise?"

"No! I asked whether you cared for Jack as much as all that."

Barbara shook her head in bewilderment.

"I've given you my heart, Eric. But I owe Jack my soul."

Behind the neat phrasing of the professional trafficker in emotions,
Eric felt that she was trying to weary him of their forty-eight hours'
engagement. . . .

3

At the beginning of November Eric went to Lashmar for a long week-end.
After the first days of his engagement he had hardly seen or heard
anything of Barbara. She was presumably at Crawleigh Abbey, but for a
week she answered no more than one letter out of three; after that, with
a sense that he could do nothing right and that they were fretting each
other's nerves, he ceased to correspond and was trying to absorb and
exhaust himself with work. Now his novel was in the agent's hand, and
"Mother's Son" had been sent to Manders.

As he dawdled before a book-stall at Waterloo, Eric's eye was caught by
"_The World and His Wife_" contents' bill, which announced, with other
attractions, an "Illustrated Interview with Mr. Eric Lane." There had
not been time for him to receive the article from his news-cutting
agency, and he bought a copy to read in the train. The pictures were
well reproduced, and he was by now so hardened to the perverse
inaccuracy and genial blatancy of the letter-press that he hardly
blushed at the aspirations which were attributed to him, until his
attention was arrested in mid-paragraph by Barbara's name. Collecting
himself and glancing almost guiltily round the somnolent carriage, he
turned back to the beginning.

"_Rumour has been busy with the names of Mr. Lane and of Lady Barbara
Neave, only daughter of the Marquess of Crawleigh. No official
announcement has been made, but the young people have been going about
together a good deal lately; some of our readers may have seen them at
the PREMIERE of 'The Bomb-Shell.' The Stage has of recent years
surrendered so much of its beauty and talent to the Peerage that it is
high time for the Peerage to make this romantic return to the Stage. . . .
Mr. Lane's advice to budding playwrights is reminiscent of Mr.
Punch's famous advice to those about to marry--'Do