red as death catches a
sinner on his bed.

She stared at the telegrams--not reading them. His arguments and
prefaces--the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it--what she had
caught of them, she blew away as so much froth. She dived to the
personal reason.

"You are tired of me."

"No," Luttrell answered hotly. "That's not true--not even a half-truth.
If I were tired of you, it would all be so easy, so brutally easy."

"But you are!" Her voice rose shrill in its violence. "You know you are
but you are too much of a coward to say so--oh, like all men!" and as
Luttrell turned to her a face startled by her outcry and uttered a
remonstrant "Hush!", she continued bitterly, "What do I care if they all
hear? I am impossible! You know that, don't you? I am quite impossible!
I have gone my own way. I am one of the people you hate--one of the
Undisciplined."

Stella Croyle hardly knew in her passion what she was saying, and
Luttrell could only wait in silence for the storm to pass. It passed
with a quickness which caught him at loss; so quickly she swept from
mood to mood.

He heard her voice at his ear, remorseful and most appealing. "Oh, Wub,
what have I done that you should treat me so?"

Sir Charles Hardiman, watchful of the duel, guessed from the movement of
her lips what she was saying.

"These nicknames are the very devil," he exclaimed, apparently about
nothing, to his startled neighbour. "The first thing a woman does when
she's fond of a man is to give him some ridiculous name, which doesn't
belong to him. She worries her wits trying this one and that one, as a
tailor tries on you a suit of clothes, and when she has got your fit,
she uses it--publicly. So others use it too and so it no longer contents
her. Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and
that she keeps to herself, for her own private use. That's the nickname
I am referring to, my dear, when I say it's the very devil."

The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might be
very right. For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames; which
was to assert that she had never been in love. For the practice seems
invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had one for
AEneas, and Virgil knew all about it. But since she was a woman, it would
be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it would never have
gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter. "Wobbles" had been the
first name whi