en now, and
her voice seemed to come from a long way off.

"That is very foolish," she said. "In the first place, if my opinion
of you is worth anything, I tell you frankly that I would rather see
you with ink-stained fingers and worn clothes, climbing your way up
toward the truth, working and thinking in an atmosphere which was not
befouled with all the small and petty things of life. It seems to me
that since it amused you to play the young man of fashion, you have
lost your touch--some portion of it, at any rate--upon the greater
things."

Saton was very angry now. He was only indifferently successful in his
attempt to conceal the fact.

"You, too," he muttered. "Well, we shall see. Naudheim has brains, and
he has worked for many years. He had worked, indeed, for many years
when the glimmerings of this thing first came to me. He could help me
if he would, but if he will not, I can do it alone."

"I wonder."

"You do not believe in me," he declared.

"No," she answered, "I do not believe in you--not altogether!"

Rochester and his wife drove down the Park. Saton followed her eyes,
noticing her slight start, and gazed after them with brooding face.

"Rochester is becoming quite a devoted husband," he remarked, with a
sneer.

"Quite," she answered. "They spend most of their time together now."

"And Lady Mary, I understand," he went on, "has reformed. Yesterday
she was opening the new wing of a hospital, and the day before she was
speaking at a Girls' Friendly Society meeting. It's an odd little
place, the world, or rather this one particular corner of it."

She rose, with a little shrug of the shoulders, and held out her hand.

"I must go," she said. "I am lunching early."

"May I walk a little way with you?" he begged.

She hesitated. After all, perhaps, it was a phase of snobbery to
dislike being seen with him--something of that same feeling which she
had never failed to remark in him.

"If you please," she answered. "I am going to take a taximeter at the
Park gates."

"I will walk with you as far as there," he said.

He tried to talk to her on ordinary topics, but he felt at once a
disadvantage. He knew so little of the people, the little round of
life in which she lived. Before they reached the gates they had
relapsed into silence.

"It is foolish of me," he said, as he called a taximeter, "to come
here simply in the hope of seeing you, to beg for a few words, and to
go away more miserable t