ome degree her demeanour towards him was changed. What it meant he
could not wholly tell. She no longer met his eyes with that look of
careless, slightly contemptuous interest. Yet when he tried to find
encouragement from the fact, he felt that he lacked all his usual
confidence. He realized with a little impulse of annoyance that in the
presence of this woman, whom he was more anxious to impress than
anyone else in the world, he was subject to sudden lapses of
self-confidence, to a certain self-depreciation, which irritated him.
Was it, he wondered, because he was always fancying that she looked at
him out of Rochester's eyes?

A cab drove past him, and stopped before the house which he had just
left. He looked behind, with a sudden feeling of almost passionate
jealousy. It was Rochester, who had driven by him unseen, and who was
now mounting the steps to her house.

CHAPTER XV

ROCHESTER IS INDIGNANT

Rochester accepted his wife's offer of a lift in her victoria after
the luncheon party in Cadogan Street.

"Mary," he said, as soon as the horses had started, "I cannot imagine
why you were so civil to that insufferable bounder Saton."

She looked at him thoughtfully.

"Is he an insufferable bounder?" she asked.

"I find him so," Rochester answered, deliberately. "He dresses like
other men, he walks and moves like other men, he speaks like other
men, and all the time I know that he is acting. He plays the game
well, but it is a game. The man is a bounder, and you will all of you
find it out some day."

"Don't you think, perhaps," his wife remarked, "that you are
prejudiced because you have some knowledge of his antecedents?"

"Not in the least," Rochester answered. "The fetish of birth has never
appealed to me. I find as many gentlefolk amongst my tenants and
servants, as at the parties to which I have the honor of escorting
you. It isn't that at all. It's a matter of insight. Some day you will
all of you find it out."

"All of us, I presume," Lady Mary said, "includes Pauline."

Rochester nodded.

"Pauline has disappointed me," he said. "Never before have I known her
instinct at fault. She must know--in her heart she must know that
there is something wrong about the fellow. And yet she receives him at
her house, and treats him with a consideration which, frankly, shall
we say, annoys me?"

"One might remind you," Lady Mary remarked, "that it is you who are
responsible for this young man's intr