take up again the book which she had been reading in a
sheltered corner of the hotel garden.

"Don't you think," he said, "that we should make better friends than
enemies?"

"I am not at all sure," she answered, calmly. "To tell you the truth,
I don't fancy you particularly in either capacity."

He laughed unpleasantly.

"You are scarcely complimentary," he remarked.

"I did not mean to be," she answered. "Why should I?"

"You are content, then, to let your husband drift back into his old
relations with the Duchess? I presume that you know what they were?"

"Whether I am or not," she answered, "what business is it of yours?"

"I will tell you, if you like," he answered. "In fact, I think it would
be better. It has been the one desire of my life to marry the Duchess of
Lenchester myself."

She smiled at him scornfully.

"Come," she said, "let me give you a little advice. Give up the idea.
They say that lookers-on see most of the game, and so far as I am
concerned I'm certainly the looker-on of this party. The Duchess doesn't
care a row of pins about you!"

"There are other marriages, besides marriages of affection," Sir Leslie
said, stiffly. "The Duchess is ambitious."

"But she is also a woman," Blanche declared. "And she is in love."

"With whom?"

"With my husband! I presume that is clear enough to most people!"

Sir Leslie was a little staggered.

"You take it very coolly," he remarked.

"Why not? The Duchess is too proud a woman to give herself away, and my
husband--belongs to me!"

"You haven't any idea of taking poison, or anything of that sort, I
suppose, have you?" he inquired. "The other woman nearly always does
that."

"Not in real life," Blanche answered, composedly. "Besides, I'm not the
other woman--I'm the one. The Duchess is the other!"

"But your husband--"

"Do you know, I should prefer not to discuss my husband--with you,"
Blanche said, calmly, taking up her book. "He is not the sort of man you
would be at all likely to understand. If you want a rich wife why don't
you propose to Clara Mannering? I suppose you knew that some unheard-of
aunt had left her fifty thousand pounds?"

Sir Leslie rose to his feet.

"I don't fancy that you and I are very sympathetic this afternoon," he
remarked. "I will go and see if any one has returned."

"Do," she answered. "I shall miss you, of course, but my book is
positively absorbing, and I am dying to go on with it."

Sir Leslie left th