ls, that
men and women betray each other. It was as old as the psalms of David.

Pah! what a fool he was to allow his heart to be wrung by what was only
the ordinary vulgar experience of those who were so silly as to mix
themselves up with their fellow creatures.

He had only himself to thank.

Well, at any rate, he was free now. He was awake now. He was not going
to put his hand in the fire a second time.

He was going abroad immediately. He would start to-morrow morning. In
the meanwhile, he would go and see somebody, call somewhere, be in high
spirits somewhere with others. They (they were Fay and Michael) would
hear of that afterwards, would see how little he cared.

He seized up his hat and went out. But when he had walked a few hundred
yards he sank down exhausted on a wooden seat in the alder coppice
overhanging the house, and remained there. The baby pheasants crept in
and out, all round him. Their little houses, each with an anxious
step-mother in it, were set at regular intervals along the grassy path.
Only yesterday he had walked along that path with the keeper, and had
thought that in the autumn he and Michael would be shooting together
once more.

They would never shoot together again.

* * * * *

As the dusk fell he heard a sound of wheels. His dog-cart returning from
Lostford, no doubt. It did not turn into the court-yard, but came on up
to the house. Wentworth peered down through the leaves.

It was the Bishop's dog-cart. He recognised the groom who drove it. To
his amazement he saw Lord Lossiemouth get out. After some parley he went
into the house.

Why should he have come?

Oh! of course, how dense he was. He had been sent over on an embassy by
Magdalen and the Bishop. They wanted to hush up the fight, and bring
about a reconciliation between him and Fay. He should be told Fay was
making herself ill with crying. His magnanimity would be appealed to by
that pompous prig. Well, he had had his journey for nothing. Wentworth
saw his servants looking for him, and hid himself in the coppice.

A couple of hours later he left the wood, and went down the steep path
to the gardens. It was nearly dark now. Lights twinkled in the house.
The lamp in the library laid a pale finger of light upon the lawn,
through the open glass doors.

Wentworth went up to it, and then as he was about to enter, shrank back
astonished.

Lord Lossiemouth was sitting there with his back t