to Lord John in a very horrible light, so that, in an instant,
racing and women and clothes and food were banished from a naked biting
world in which he was a naked solitary figure.

He caught a train as one flies from some horrible plague: he arrived in
London, breathless, confused, miserable, the foundations of Life broken
from beneath him.

Here he found Lady Adela in a like condition.

He had never cared very greatly for his sister, he had not found her
sympathetic or amusing, she had never appealed to him for assistance,
nor challenged his violent opposition. He had never enquired very deeply
into her interests; she had much correspondence and many acquaintances.
She ran, he supposed, the house or, at least, directed Miss Rand to run
it for her.

He thought her a rather stupid woman, but then all the Beaminsters
thought one another stupid because they believed so intensely in the
Duchess and she had always made a point of seeing that, individually,
they despised one another, although collectively they faced the world.

Finally, Adela had always seemed to him unsympathetic towards Rachel and
that he found it very hard to forgive--but then, he often reflected they
were all, with the exception of himself, a most unsentimental family. He
wondered sometimes why he was so different.

On the afternoon of his return from Newmarket, however, he began to
wonder whether, after all, Adela had not more in common with him than he
had ever expected. He had lunched at the club, had plunged down into the
City to enquire about some investments, it had begun to rain, and he had
returned with the weight of that gloomy day full heavily upon him.

He did not, as a rule, have tea, but to-day he needed company, and he
found Adela in the little sitting-room next to the library, a little
room with faded wall-paper, faded pictures (groups, some of them, of
himself and Vincent and Richard at Eton and Oxford), faded arm-chairs
and faded chintzes--a nice, cosy, friendly room, full of old
associations and old hopes and despairs.

This room did not often see either Lady Adela or John, but to-day
Norris, for reasons best known to himself, had put tea there and, to
both of them, as they sat over the fire with the great house so still
and quiet about them, the shabby intimacy of the little place was
grateful.

John, disturbed, himself, out of his normal easy geniality, noticed that
Adela also was disturbed.

That dry and rather gritty a