"But how you will enjoy it!"

"And what will you do?"

"I live from day to day, my dear. I am quite contented."

"This journey is not a mere caprice. I have been contemplating it for
some time," he said.

Mrs. Rennes' hair was white and her long, equine countenance, sallow.
When her feelings were stirred, she showed it only by a cloudy pallor
which would steal over her face as a kind of veil--separating her from
the rest of mortals.

"One has to get away from England," continued Rennes: "one has to get
away from one's self."

"And where is your self now?" she asked, not venturing to look at him.

"With that girl," he answered, suddenly; "with that girl."

"Do you love her?"

"I don't know. I suppose I do. Oh! I would love her if I could ever be
absolutely sincere. But this I do know--I can't see her married to that
fellow Reckage. So I must go away."

"I am afraid she is a coquette--a serious coquette, my dear boy."

"She is nothing of the kind. She is a true woman. Don't talk about
her."

CHAPTER VIII

Sara had spent the morning crying bitterly, in bed. Her letter to the
Duke of Marshire was on the table by her side. From time to time she had
taken it up, turned it over, shed fresh tears, and reproached herself
for indecision. She held at bay every thought of Robert Orange, and
formed the resolve of banishing him from her mind for ever. When the
time came to dress for luncheon, she brightened a little, for the
prospect of disguising her true feelings in the presence of Lord Reckage
and Pensee appealed to that genius for mischief which animated the whole
current of her life. _To baffle the looker-on_ seemed not merely a great
science, but the one game of wits which could never lose its interest.
She was not insincere. She thought that lies, as a rule, were clumsy
shifts, and abominable. Even in the moments when she was most thoroughly
conscious of her talent for misleading others, she had never brought
herself to think well of deception. She would have liked to feel that
her heart was an open book for her friends to read. It would have been
pleasant, she believed, if all could have known always that she
practised a delicate art and played, consummately, fine comedy whenever
she found spectators. But a solitary, mismanaged childhood, and the
constant sense of being in many ways a foreigner, had taught her the
penalty of frankness where sympathy could not supply, from its own
knowledge, the unut