graph of a handsome man of
twenty-eight or thirty, small-featured, fair, and shifty looking.

"Who is that?" he asked abruptly.

"Do you not know? My husband."

Paul muttered an apology, but he did not turn away from the photograph.

"Oh, never mind," said Mrs. Sydney Bamborough, in reply to his regret
that he had stumbled upon a painful subject. "I never--"

She paused.

"No," she went on, "I won't say that."

But, so far as conveying what she meant was concerned, she might just as
well have uttered the words.

"I do not want a sympathy which is unmerited," she said gravely.

He turned and looked at her, sitting in a graceful attitude, the
incarnation of a most refined and nineteenth-century misfortune. She
raised her eyes to his for a moment--a sort of photographic
instantaneous shutter, exposing for the hundredth part of a second the
sensitive plate of her heart. Then she suppressed a sigh--badly.

"I was married horribly young," she said, "before I knew what I was
doing. But even if I had known I do not suppose I should have had the
strength of mind to resist my father and mother."

"They forced you into it?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Bamborough. And it is possible that a respectable and
harmless pair of corpses turned in their respective coffins somewhere in
the neighborhood of Norwood.

"I hope there is a special hell reserved for parents who ruin their
daughters' lives to suit their own ambition," said Paul, with a sudden
concentrated heat which rather startled his hearer.

This man was full of surprises for Etta Sydney Bamborough. It was like
playing with fire--a form of amusement which will be popular as long as
feminine curiosity shall last.

"You are rather shocking," she said lightly. "But it is all over now, so
we need not dig up old grievances. Only I want you to understand that
that photograph represents a part of my life which was only
painful--nothing else."

Paul, standing in front of her, looked down thoughtfully at the
beautiful upturned face. His hands were clasped behind him, his firm
mouth set sternly beneath the great fair mustache. In Russia the men
have good eyes--blue, fierce, intelligent. Such eyes had the son of the
Princess Alexis. There was something in Etta Bamborough that stirred up
within him a quality which men are slowly losing--namely, chivalry.
Steinmetz held that this man was quixotic, and what Steinmetz said was
usually worth some small attention. Whatever faults that