if Susy were in trouble, she should turn to her old friend Grace.

But why in trouble? What trouble? What could have happened to check her
triumphant career?

"That's what I mean to find out!" he exclaimed.

His heart was beating with a tumult of new hopes and old memories. The
sight of his wife, so remote in mien and manner from the world in
which he had imagined her to be re-absorbed, changed in a flash his own
relation to life, and flung a mist of unreality over all that he
had been trying to think most solid and tangible. Nothing now was
substantial to him but the stones of the street in which he stood, the
front of the house which hid her, the bell-handle he already felt in
his grasp. He started forward, and was halfway to the threshold when a
private motor turned the corner, the twin glitter of its lamps carpeting
the wet street with gold to Susy's door.

Lansing drew back into the shadow as the motor swept up to the house. A
man jumped out, and the light fell on Strefford's shambling figure, its
lazy disjointed movements so unmistakably the same under his fur coat,
and in the new setting of prosperity.

Lansing stood motionless, staring at the door. Strefford rang, and
waited. Would Susy appear again? Perhaps she had done so before only
because she had been on the watch....

But no: after a slight delay a bonne appeared--the breathless
maid-of-all-work of a busy household--and at once effaced herself,
letting the visitor in. Lansing was sure that not a word passed between
the two, of enquiry on Lord Altringham's part, or of acquiescence on the
servant's. There could be no doubt that he was expected.

The door closed on him, and a light appeared behind the blind of the
adjoining window. The maid had shown the visitor into the sitting-room
and lit the lamp. Upstairs, meanwhile, Susy was no doubt running skilful
fingers through her tumbled hair and daubing her pale lips with red.
Ah, how Lansing knew every movement of that familiar rite, even to the
pucker of the brow and the pouting thrust-out of the lower lip! He was
seized with a sense of physical sickness as the succession of remembered
gestures pressed upon his eyes.... And the other man? The other man,
inside the house, was perhaps at that very instant smiling over the
remembrance of the same scene!

At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.

XXVII

SUSY and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, divided from
each other by a