had certainly come tardily, but not the less surely.

He did not, he told himself, love Lady Ethel as a man should love the
wife of his bosom. Middle-aged, worn, and unemotional though he might
be, he knew that he was yet capable of a much deeper feeling than she
had evoked and he had wakened to a realisation of this since he had
again seen Bella.

He was no fool; he was, on the contrary, a shrewd, clever,
quick-witted man of the world and it was impossible to shut his eyes
to the trouble. He thought of Bella as she was when he had first
married her; he recalled their courtship, her pretty half shy, half
tender ways--the girlish prettiness which time had turned into shame.

She had left a scrap of lace on his table for her throat or her
veil--Heaven knew what--and his eyes grew blurred and dim as he gazed
at it. He repeated mentally phrases which had fallen from her,
piecing them together and trying to weave the pattern of her life out
of the fragments.

She had changed pathetically. She had acquired the manner that her
sister used to have, and which he had so strenuously objected to--the
slangy, devil-may-care tone, the total absence of which in the old
days had made his little sweetheart so conspicuously different from
her environment. She wore now the impress of evil, from her Regent
Street hat to her Paris gown. Manifestly she had risen in her
vocation, but he knew that her salary alone had never supplied the
costume or the rings, and his heart ached.

That night he sat at the Duchess of Huddersfield's table facing his
_fiancee_, and for the first time he wondered if sang-froid or
perfect equanimity were all that a man such as himself might desire.
She was, as Bella had put it, "One of his own class--a lady," which
she had never been, poor Bella! but he did wonder just a little how
much of real heart beat under the dainty laces that shrouded Lady
Ethel's bosom. He had reflected once and not so long ago that that
portion of a woman's anatomy was superfluous, but he wavered in his
belief now. He could stake his professional honour, his hopes of
eternity--of--everything--on the absolute purity of this girl;
nothing would ever tempt Lady Ethel to swerve ever so little from the
path of rectitude and decorum. The cold, proud patrician face spoke
for itself, and yet--he was in a brown study when the voice of his
prospective mother-in-law brought him out of the clouds.

"And now," she said in a significant tone and