her daughter of
Eve--always excepting his wife--must needs strike those who had the
slightest acquaintance with Lord Parham as a delicious absurdity.

Suddenly Darrell checked himself, and bent forward.

"Where--if I may ask--is the poet?"

"Geoffrey? Somewhere in the Balkans, isn't he?--making a revolution."

Darrell nodded.

"I remember. They say he is with the revolutionary committee at
Marinitza. Meanwhile there is a new volume of poems out--to-day," said
Darrell, glancing at a newspaper thrown down beside him.

"I have seen it. The 'portrait' at the end--"

"Is Lady Kitty." They spoke under their breaths.

"Unmistakable, I think," said Kitty's best friend. "As poetry, it seems
to me the best thing in the book, but the audacity of it!" She raised
her eyebrows in a half-unwilling, half-contemptuous admiration.

"Has she seen it?"

Mrs. Alcot replied that she had not noticed any copy in the house, and
that Kitty had not spoken of it, which, given the Kitty-nature, she
probably would have done, had it reached her.

Then they both fell into reverie, from which Darrell emerged with the
remark:

"I gather that last year some very important person interfered?"

This opened another line of gossip, in which, however, Mrs. Alcot showed
herself equally well informed. It was commonly reported, at any rate,
that the old Duke of Morecambe, the head of Lady Eleanor Cliffe's
family, the great Tory evangelical of the north, who was a sort of
patriarch in English political and aristocratic life, had been induced
by some undefined pressure to speak very plainly to his kinsman on the
subject of Lady Kitty Ashe. Cliffe had expectations from the duke which
were not to be trifled with. He had, accordingly, swallowed the lecture,
and, after the loss of his election, had again left England with an
important newspaper commission to watch events in the Balkans.

"May he stay there!" said Darrell. "Of course, the whole thing was
absurdly exaggerated."

"Was it?" said Mrs. Alcot, coolly. "Kitty richly deserved most of what
was said." Then--on his start--"Don't misunderstand me, of course. If
twenty actions for divorce were given against Kitty, I should believe
nothing--<i>nothing</i>!" The words were as emphatic as voice and gesture
could make them. "But as for the tales that people who hate her tell of
her, and will go on telling of her--"

"They are merely the harvest of what she has sown?"

"Naturally. Poor Kitty!"

Ma