d, and, without
waiting for an answer, went on:

"I thought so too, but I can't hear of a job. There are too many of the
unemployed just now. However, no doubt, as you say, I shall soon be
made absolute ruler of some province twice the size of England."

He laughed and smoothed his moustache with one hand.

"Down with dull care, Miss Dexter; let us make a pact never to be
bored--in Bloomsbury, or West Africa, or Park Lane. I suppose you found
a great deal to do to that dear old house?"

After that their other neighbours claimed them both; but during dessert
Molly, against her will, lost hold of the talk on her right, and had to
listen to Edmund again.

"I hear that you have got the old Florentine looking-glasses from my
sale."

"I don't think they were from your sale," said Molly hastily.

"Well, Perks told me so."

"Perks never told me," muttered Molly.

"I should think they must suit the house to perfection. Where have you
put them?"

"In the small dining-room."

"Yes; they must do admirably there. I should like to see them again." He
looked at her with a faintly sarcastic smile. She knew what he intended
her to say, and, against her will, she said hastily:

"Won't you come and see them?"

"With great pleasure."

Molly saw that Adela had risen, and sprang up and turned away in one
sudden movement. She was very angry with him for forcing her to say
that, and she could not conceive what had made her yield.

"'The teeth that bite; the claws that scratch,'" he thought to himself,
"but safely chained up--and the movements are beautiful." He stood
looking after her.

"I did as you told me," said the hostess, pausing for a moment as she
followed her guests to the door. "If Molly blames me, shall I say that
you asked to take her in?"

"Say just what you like; I trust you entirely." He did not attempt to
speak to Molly after dinner, or when they met again at a ball that same
night. All her burning wish to snub him could not be gratified. He
seemed not to know shat she was still in the room. But she knew
instinctively that he watched her, and she was not sorry he should see
her in the crowd, and be witness, however unwillingly, to her position
in the world he knew so well. It added to the sense of intoxication that
often possessed her now. "Be drunken," says Baudelaire, "be drunken with
wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you will, only be drunken."
And that Molly could be drunken with flattery, wit