or, perhaps, in those calculations?" he suggested.
"It can be amended."

"Don't be a brute," she answered fiercely.

He shrugged his shoulders.

"That sounds a little severe," he remarked.

"Don't take any notice of anything I say tonight," she murmured softly.
"I am a little mad. I think that everything is going against me! I know
that you haven't a grain of sympathy for me--that you would rather see
me suffer than not, and yet you see I give myself away entirely. Why
shouldn't I? Part of it is through you in a way."

"I rather fancied," he remarked, "that up to now--"

"Yes! Of course!" she interrupted, "you saved me from ruin, staved it
off at any rate. And you held over the reckoning! I--I almost wish--"

She paused. Again her eyes were searching his.

"I am a little tired of it all, you see," she continued. "I don't
suppose Lumley and I can ever be the same again since I brought
him--that check. He avoids being alone with me--I do the same with him.
One would think--to watch the people, that the whole transaction was in
the Morning Post. They smile when they see us together, they grin when
they see you with anybody else. It's getting hateful, Wingrave!"

"I am afraid," he said quietly, "that you are in a nervous,
hypersensitive state. No one else can possibly know of the little
transaction between us, and, so far as I am concerned, there has been
nothing to interfere with your relations with your husband."

"You are right," she answered, "I am losing my nerve. I am only afraid
that I am losing something else. I haven't an ounce of battle left in
me. I feel that I should like to close my eyes and wake up in a new
world, and start all over again."

"It is nothing but a mood," he assured her. "Those new worlds don't
exist any longer. They generally consist of foreign watering places
where the sheep and the goats house together now and then. I think I
should play the game out, Lady Ruth, until--"

"Until what?"

"Perhaps to the end," he answered. "Who can tell? Not I! By this time
tomorrow, it might be I who would be reminding you--"

"Yes?"

"That there are other worlds, and other lives to live!"

"I should like," she whispered very softly, "to hear of them. But I
fancy somehow that you will never be my instructor. What of your ward?"

"Well! What of her?" he answered calmly.

She shivered a little.

"You were very frank with me once, Wingrave," she said. "You are a man
whose life fate has wrec