f I'm to do any good. My senior
assistant here will have to do the best he can, that's all."

Although Mrs. Delarayne was quite prepared for this, she had hoped even
until the last that Lord Henry might be able to treat Cleopatra from a
distance, and that she would therefore be spared the duty of having him
at Brineweald. It was a hard pill to swallow, but she took it
gracefully.

"When can you come?" she asked with forced cheerfulness.

"Can you send the car for me at about quarter to eight this evening?"

Mrs. Delarayne promised to do this, and the young man rose.

She held his hand for some time as they said good-bye, and gazed
longingly into his face. It seemed to her that after this last meeting,
alone, on their old terms, nothing could any longer be quite the same.
He would become the friend of other members of her family. He would no
longer be her private refuge, her nook-and-corner intimate, her own
friend, her secret.

"Lord Henry," she pleaded on their way downstairs, "would you advise me
to say anything to Leonetta?"

"What can you say?" he protested.

"My sister says I ought to scold the child for what she calls her 'fast'
way with young men."

"Oh, nonsense!" Lord Henry exclaimed. "What can you tell the girl?--to
be less fascinating, to be less beautiful, to be less full of life? That
would be as futile as it would be deforming. You can only watch her so
that she does not come to harm, or fall into the hands of a villain. You
cannot moralise. I think you have been wonderful to restrain yourself so
far. But continue doing so."

"You see, I remember what I was at her age!" the widow admitted
bashfully.

Lord Henry laughed, and in a moment she laughed with him.

He accompanied her to the door, and feeling very much relieved she
rejoined her daughter.

* * * * *

At half-past four that afternoon, just as the car bearing away Lord
Henry's last out-patient, had glided out of the drive, he sent for St.
Maur.

The day had been a particularly heavy one. Unfortunate, miserable, and
beautiful girls, with everything they could wish for, had come in their
dozens for the last month, with nervous tics that utterly marred their
beauty and blighted their lives. He had seen no less than three that
day. Business men, Army men, clergymen, married women, mothers, each
with some kind of nervous catch in their voices, uncontrollable spasms
in their limbs, stammers, or obsessions,