s, dinner-parties of young people, fresh air and exercise--are
the very things which after a time fail to satisfy the person with
imagination. You want more out of life, always the something you don't
understand, the something beyond. And so you keep on trying new things,
and for every new thing you try, you drop an old one. Isn't it something
like that?"

"I suppose it is," she admitted wearily.

"Drugs take the place of wholesome wine," he went on, warming to his
subject. "The hideous fascination of flirting with the uncouth or the
impossible some way or another, stimulates a passion which simple means
have ceased to gratify. You seek for the unusual in every way--in food,
in the substitution of absinthe for your harmless Martini, of cocaine
for your stimulating champagne. There is a horrible wave of all this
sort of thing going on to-day in many places, and I am afraid," he
concluded, "that a great many of our very nicest young women are caught
up in it."

"Guilty," she confessed. "Now cure me."

"I could point out the promised land, but how, could I lead you to it?"
he answered.

"You don't like me well enough," she sighed.

"I like you better than you believe," he assured her, slackening his
speed a little. "We have met, I suppose, a dozen times in our lives. I
have danced with you here and there, talked nonsense once, I remember,
at a musical reception--"

"I tried to flirt with you then," she interrupted.

He nodded.

"I was in the midst of a great case," he said, "and everything that
happened to me outside it was swept out of my mind day by day. What I
was going to say is that I have always liked you, from the moment when
your mother presented me to you at your first dance."

"I wish you'd told me so," she murmured.

"It wouldn't have made any difference," he declared. "I wasn't in a
position to think of a duke's daughter, in those days. I don't suppose I
am now."

"Try," she begged hopefully.

He smiled back at her. The reawakening of her sense of humour was
something.

"Too late," he regretted. "During the last month or so the thing has
come to me which we all look forward to, only I don't think fate has
treated me kindly. I have always loved normal ways and normal people,
and the woman I care for is different."

"Tell me about her?" she insisted.

"You will be very surprised when I tell you her name," he said. "It is
Margaret Hilditch."

She looked at him for a moment in blank astonish