er person did I not know you to be utterly incapable of
caring for anybody. Do you want to make me hate you, Honoria?"

Geoffrey's low concentrated voice and earnest manner told his wife, who
was watching him with something like a smile upon her clear-cut lips,
how deeply he was moved. He had lost his self-control, and exposed his
heart to her--a thing he rarely did, and that in itself was a triumph
which she did not wish to pursue at the moment. Geoffrey was not a man
to push too far.

"If you have quite finished, Geoffrey, there is something I should like
to say----"

"Oh, curse it all!" he broke in.

"Yes?" she said calmly and interrogatively, and made a pause, but as
he did not specially apply his remark to anybody or anything, she
continued: "If these flowers of rhetoric are over, what I have to say
is this: I do not intend to stay in this horrid place any longer. I am
going to-morrow to my brother Garsington. They asked us both, you may
remember, but for reasons best known to yourself, you would not go."

"You know my reasons very well, Honoria."

"I beg your pardon. I have not the slightest idea what they were," said
Lady Honoria with conviction. "May I hear them?"

"Well, if you wish to know, I will not go to the house of a man who
has--well, left my club as Garsington left it, and who, had it not
been for my efforts, would have left it in an even more unpleasant and
conspicuous fashion. And his wife is worse than he is----"

"I think you are mistaken," Lady Honoria said coldly, and with the air
of a person who shuts the door of a room into which she does not wish to
look. "And, any way, it all happened years ago and has blown over. But
I do not see the necessity of discussing the subject further. I suppose
that we shall meet at dinner to-night. I shall take the early train
to-morrow."

"Do what suits you, Honoria. Perhaps you would prefer not returning at
all."

"Thank you, no. I will not lay myself open to imputations. I shall join
you in London, and will make the best of a bad business. Thank Heaven,
I have learned how to bear my misfortunes," and with this Parthian shot
she left the room.

For a minute or two her husband felt as though he almost hated her. Then
he thrust his face into the pillow and groaned.

"She is right," he said to himself; "we must make the best of a bad
business. But, somehow, I seem to have made a mess of my life. And yet I
loved her once--for a month or two."

This w