t. Good night! Such a charming evening."

The carriage rolled smoothly down the avenue from the great house, over
which she might so easily have reigned, and turned into the road. A few
minutes later the motor-car flashed by. Afterwards there was solitude,
for it was already past midnight. Gilbert Deyes looked thoughtfully out
at the carriage from his place in the car. He had begged--very hard for
him--for that empty seat.

"Of what is it a sign," he asked, "when a woman seeks solitude?"

Lady Peggy shrugged her shoulders.

"Wilhelmina is tired of us all, I suppose," she remarked. "She gets like
that sometimes."

"Then of what is it a sign," he persisted, "when a woman tires of
people--like us?"

Lady Peggy yawned.

"In a woman of more primitive instincts," she said, "it would mean an
affair. But Wilhelmina has outgrown all that. She is the only woman of
our acquaintance of whom one would dare to say it, but I honestly
believe that to Wilhelmina men are like puppets. Was she born, I wonder,
with ice in her veins?"

"One wonders," Deyes remarked softly. "A woman like that is always
something of a mystery. By the bye, wasn't there a whisper of something
the year she lived in Florence?"

"People have talked of her, of course," Lady Peggy answered. "In
Florence, a woman without a lover is like a child without toys. To be
virtuous there is the one offence which Society does not pardon."

"I believe," Deyes said, "that a lover would bore Wilhelmina terribly."

"Why the dickens doesn't she marry Leslie?" Austin asked, opening his
eyes for a moment.

"Too obvious," Deyes murmured. "Some day I can't help fancying that she
will give us all a shock."

A mile or more behind, the lady with ice in her veins, leaned back
amongst the cushions of her carriage, drinking in, with a keenness of
appreciation which surprised even herself, the beauties of the still,
hot night. The moon was as yet barely risen. In the half light, the
country and the hills beyond, with their tumbled masses of rock, seemed
unreal--of strange and mysterious outline. More than anything, she was
conscious of a sense of softness. The angles were gone from all the
crude places, it was peace itself which had settled upon the land.
Peace, and a wonderful silence! The birds had long ago ceased to sing,
no breath of wind was abroad to stir the leaves of the trees. All the
cheerful chorus of country sounds which make music throughout the long
summer day h