time."

"I wonder what you are thinking about, Philip?" she asked
meditatively; "something has annoyed you to-night; I wonder if you
are going to tell me."

He laughed.

"Do we ever tell each other our annoyances? I think we sit and look
at each other, and discover them. That is much more appropriate."

"You take things too seriously," she went on; "my dear, they are
really not worth it. That is my settled conviction."

She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling
good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a
certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask
of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious
candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the
stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to the
last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical,
and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of
laughter"--a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at
times as richly sardonic--in the decent drapery of her fictitious
youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very
reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her
expressive eyebrows.

"You are wonderful," he exclaimed, after an interval, "wonderful;
that was what I was thinking."

She smiled disinterestedly.

"Because you don't understand me? My dear, nothing is so easy as
mystification; that is why I don't return the compliment. Yourself,
you know, are not very intelligible to-night."

He looked away frowning, but without embarrassment; presently
throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he
remarked:

"I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can't. I am
unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find
Mary."

"Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary
yet; smoke another cigarette."

He took one and lit it, absently, in the blue flame of the
spirit-lamp, and she watched him closely with her bright, curious
eyes.

"You know this Mr. Lightmark very well, don't you, Philip?"

"Intimately," he answered, nodding.

"You must be pleased," she said. "It is a great match for him, a
struggling artist. Can he paint, by the way?"

"He has great talent." He held his cigarette away from him,
considered the ash critically. "Yes, he can certainly paint. I
suppose it is a good thing--and for Eve, too. Why should it not be?"

"He