to contradict. The silverpoint etchings upon the wall
were of the school of Hellieu, delicate but daring, exquisite in
workmanship and design, the last word in the expression of modern life
and love. A study of Psyche, in white marble, fascinated him with its
wonderful outline and sense of arrested motion. The atmosphere appeared
to him intensely feminine and yet strange. He realised suddenly that it
contained no knick-knacks,--nothing, in short, but books and flowers.
Perhaps his greatest surprise, however, came at the opening of the door.
It seemed at first that he was confronted by a stranger. The woman who
entered in a perfectly white gown of some clinging material, with a
single row of pearls around her neck, with ringless fingers and plainly
coiled hair, seemed like the ghost of her own girlhood. It was only when
she smiled, a smile which, curiously enough, seemed to bring back
something of that aging sadness into her face, that he found himself able
to readjust his tangled impressions. Then he realised that she was no
longer a girl, that she was indeed a woman, beautiful, graceful, serious,
with all the charm of her greater physical and spiritual maturity.

"Please don't think," she begged, as she sank into the settee by which he
was standing, "that I have inveigled you here under false pretences.
Henry took the trouble to ring me up from the City this morning to say
that he should be dining at home--such an unusual event that I took it
for granted it meant a tete-a-tete.--I don't quite know why I treat you
with such an extraordinary amount of confidence," she went on, "but I
feel that I must and it helps me so much. A tete-a-tete dinner with my
husband would have been insupportable. I should have had to telephone to
Sarah Baldwin if you had not been available. Sarah would probably have
been engaged, and then I should have had to have gone to bed with a
headache."

"You don't imagine," he asked, smiling, "that I am disappointed at your
husband's absence?"

"I hope not," she answered, raising her eyes to his for a moment.

"Let me imitate your adorable frankness," he begged. "I hope your
husband's absence this evening is not because he objects to meeting me?"

"Of course not," she replied wonderingly. "Why on earth should he object
to meeting you?"

"You probably don't know," Wingate replied, "that I am in a sort of way
the declared enemy of the British and Imperial Granaries--Phipps' latest
escapade--of wh