e--the
impudent minx!--who actually made me believe--However, Jack
explained all that, after I had made both a spectacle and a nuisance of
myself, and he had behaved so nobly in the entire affair that for days
afterwards I was positively limp with repentance. Then in Paris that
flighty Mrs. Hardress--but he explained that, too. Some women are
shameless, Rudolph," Mrs. Charteris concluded, and sighed her pity for
them.

"Utterly so," Musgrave assented, gravely.

He was feeling a thought uncomfortable. To him the place had grown
portentous. The sun was low, and the long shadows of the trees were
black on the dim lawn. People were assembling for supper, and passing to
and fro under low-hanging branches; and the gaily-colored gowns of the
women glimmered through a faint blue haze like that with which Boucher
and Watteau and Fragonard loved to veil, and thereby to make wistful,
somehow, the antics of those fine parroquet-like manikins who figure in
their _fetes galantes._

Inside the house, someone was playing an unpleasant sort of air on the
piano--an air which was quite needlessly creepy and haunting and
insistent. It all seemed like a grim bit out of a play. The tenderness
and pride that shone in Anne's eyes as she boasted of her happiness
troubled Rudolph Musgrave. He had a perfectly unreasonable desire to
carry her away, by force, if necessary, and to protect her from clever
people, and to buy things for her.

"So, I am an old, old married woman now, and--and I think in some ways
I suit Jack better than a more brilliant person might. I am glad your
wife has taken a fancy to him. And I want you to profit by her example.
Jack says she is one of the most attractive women he ever met. He asked
me to-day why I didn't do my hair like hers. She must make you very
happy, Rudolph?"

"My wife," Colonel Musgrave said, "is in my partial opinion, a very
clever and very beautiful woman."

"Yes; cleverness and beauty are sufficient to make any man happy, I
suppose," Anne hazarded. "Jack says, though--_Are_ cleverness and beauty
the main things in life, Rudolph?"

"Undoubtedly," he protested.

"Now, that," she said, judicially, "shows the difference in men. Jack
says a man loves a woman, not for her beauty or any other quality she
possesses, but just because she is the woman he loves and can't help
loving."

"Ah! I dare say that is the usual reason. Yes," said Colonel
Musgrave,--"because she is the woman he loves and canno