dignant. She's taken advantage of the general
demoralisation to eat up everything in the house. . . . Billy fell
downstairs, fox-hunting, and his nose bled all over that pink Kirman
rug. . . . Boots _is_ a dear; do you know what he's done?"

"What?" asked Eileen listlessly, raising the back of her slender hand
from her eyes to peer at Nina through the glimmer of tears.

"Well, he and Phil have moved out of Boots's house, and Boots has wired
Gerald and Gladys that the house is ready for them until they can find a
place of their own. Of course they'll both come here--in fact, their
luggage is upstairs now--Boots takes the blue room and Phil his old
quarters, . . . But don't you think it is perfectly sweet of Boots? And
isn't it good to have Philip back again?"

"Y-es," said Eileen faintly. Lying there, the deep azure of her eyes
starred with tears, a new tremor altered her mouth, and the tight-curled
upper lip quivered. Her heart, too, had begun its heavy, unsteady
response in recognition of her lover's name; she turned partly away from
Nina, burying her face in her brilliant hair; and beside her slim
length, straight and tense, her arms lay, the small hands contracting
till they had closed as tightly as her teeth.

It was no child, now, who lay there, fighting down the welling
desolation; no visionary adolescent grieving over the colourless ashes
of her first romance; not even the woman, socially achieved,
intelligently and intellectually in love. It was a girl, old enough to
realise that the adoration she had given was not wholly spiritual, that
her delight in her lover and her response to him was not wholly of the
mind, not so purely of the intellect; that there was still more,
something sweeter, more painful, more bewildering that she could give
him, desired to give--nay, that she could not withhold even with sealed
eyes and arms outstretched in the darkness of wakeful hours, with her
young heart straining in her breast and her set lips crushing back the
unuttered cry.

Love! So that was it!--the need, the pain, the bewilderment, the hot
sleeplessness, the mad audacity of a blessed dream, the flushed
awakening, stunned rapture--and then the gray truth, bleaching the rose
tints from the fading tapestries of slumberland, leaving her flung
across her pillows, staring at daybreak.

* * * * *

Nina had laid a cool smooth hand across her forehead, pushing back the
hair--a light caress,