ny
guns!" Ransom exclaimed.

"Well, she at least is not mine!" Olive returned, springing to her feet.
She looked round her as if she were really pressed too hard, panting
like a hunted creature.

"Your defence is your certain immunity from attack. Perhaps if you won't
tell me where you are staying, you will kindly ask Miss Tarrant herself
to do so. Would she send me a word on a card?"

"We are in West Tenth Street," Olive said; and she gave the number. "Of
course you are free to come."

"Of course I am! Why shouldn't I be? But I am greatly obliged to you for
the information. I will ask her to come out, so that you won't see us."
And he turned away, with the sense that it was really insufferable, her
attempt always to give him the air of being in the wrong. If that was
the kind of spirit in which women were going to act when they had more
power!

XXIX

Mrs. Luna was early in the field the next day, and her sister wondered
to what she owed the honour of a visit from her at eleven o'clock in the
morning. She very soon saw, when Adeline asked her whether it had been
she who procured for Basil Ransom an invitation to Mrs. Burrage's.

"Me--why in the world should it have been me?" Olive asked, feeling
something of a pang at the implication that it had not been Adeline, as
she supposed.

"I didn't know--but you took him up so."

"Why, Adeline Luna, when did I ever----?" Miss Chancellor exclaimed,
staring and intensely grave.

"You don't mean to say you have forgotten how you brought him on to see
you, a year and a half ago!"

"I didn't bring him on--I said if he happened to be there."

"Yes, I remember how it was: he did happen, and then you happened to
hate him, and tried to get out of it."

Miss Chancellor saw, I say, why Adeline had come to her at the hour she
knew she was always writing letters, after having given her all the
attention that was necessary the day before; she had come simply to make
herself disagreeable, as Olive knew, of old, the spirit sometimes moved
her irresistibly to do. It seemed to her that Adeline had been
disagreeable enough in not having beguiled Basil Ransom into a marriage,
according to that memorable calculation of probabilities in which she
indulged (with a licence that she scarcely liked definitely to recall)
when the pair made acquaintance under her eyes in Charles Street, and
Mrs. Luna seemed to take to him as much as she herself did little. She
would gladly have a