half-sisterly, half-motherly, toward the
grave-faced young man. It was all a part of the delicious change which
these past few days had wrought in her, this warm and supple softness of
mien, of eye and smile and voice.

But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith, could
have taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. Thorpe gave
more attention to this problem, during dinner, than he did to the
conversation of the table. His exchange of sporadic remarks with the
young Duchess beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair, which
left him abundant leisure to contemplate her profile in silence, while
she turned to listen to the general talk, of which Miss Madden and the
Hon. Winifred Plowden bore the chief burden. The talk of these ladies
interested him but indifferently, though the frequent laughter suggested
that it was amusing. He looked from his wife to the Duchess and back
again, in ever-recurring surprise that the coronet had been carried
past Edith. And once he looked a long time at his wife and the Duke, and
formulated the theory that she must have refused him. No doubt that was
why she had been sympathetically fond of him ever since, and was being
so nice to him now. Yes--clearly that was it. He felt upon this that he
also liked the Duke very much.

It was by no means so apparent that the Duke liked him. Both he and his
Duchess, indeed, were scrupulously and even deferentially polite, but
there was a painstaking effect about it, which, seemingly, they lacked
the art altogether to conceal. It seemed to Thorpe that the other guests
unconsciously took their cue from this august couple, and all exposed
somewhat the effort their civility to him involved. At another time the
suspicion of this would have stung him. He had only to glance across the
table to where his wife sat now, and it was all right. What other
people thought of him--how other people liked or disliked him--was of no
earthly importance. Whenever he chose to exert himself, he could compel
from them the behaviour that he desired. It was their dull inability
to read character which prompted them to regard him as merely a rich
outsider who had married Edith Cressage. He viewed with a comfortable
tolerance this infirmity of theirs. When the time came, if he wanted to
do so, he could awaken them to their delusion as by forked lightning and
the burst of thunder.

The whim came to him, and expanded swiftly into a determination,