er
thought her depressed.

"Has William ever interfered?" she asked, cautiously.

Lady Tranmore hesitated.

"Not that I know of," she said, at last. "Nor will he ever--in the sense
in which any ordinary husband would interfere."

"I know! It is as though he had a kind of superstition about it. Isn't
there a fairy story, in which an elf marries a mortal on condition that
if he ever ill-treats her, her people will fetch her back to fairyland?
One day the husband lost his temper and spoke crossly; instantly there
was a crash of thunder and the elf-wife vanished."

"I don't remember the story. But it's like that--exactly. He said to me
once that he would never have asked her to marry him if he had not been
able to make up his mind to let her have her own way--never to coerce
her."

But having said this, Lady Tranmore repented. It seemed to her she had
been betraying William's affairs. She drew her chair back from the fire,
and rang to ask if the carriage had arrived. Mary took the hint. She
arrayed herself in her cloak, and chatted agreeably about other things
till the moment for their departure came.

As they drove through the streets, Lady Tranmore stole a glance at her
companion.

"She is really very handsome," she thought--"much better-looking than
she was at twenty. What are the men about, not to marry her?"

It was indeed a puzzle. For Mary was increasingly agreeable as the years
went on, and had now quite a position of her own in London, as a
charming woman without angles or apparent egotisms; one of the
initiated besides, whom any dinner-party might be glad to capture. Her
relations, near and distant, held so many of the points of vantage in
English public life that her word inevitably carried weight. She talked
politics, as women of her class must talk them to hold their own; she
supported the Church; and she was elegantly charitable, in that popular
sense which means that you subscribe to your friends' charities without
setting up any of your own. She was rich also--already in possession of
a considerable fortune, inherited from her mother, and prospective
heiress of at least as much again from her father, old Sir Richard
Lyster, whose house in Somersetshire she managed to perfection. In the
season she stayed with various friends, or with Lady Tranmore, Sir
Richard being now infirm, and preferring the country. There was a
younger sister, who was known to have married imprudently, and against
her father