lever enough to create, and he
neither knew nor cared to what state of devastation he might bring the
country. He was a fitting mate in every way for Cecilia Cricklander, and
completely equipped to play with her at her own game.

So, when they met in her sitting-room in the Florentine hotel, each
experienced a pleasurable emotion.

His was tempered--or augmented--by a blunt and sufficiently brutal
passion, which only the ideal of circumspect outward conduct which
dominates the non-conformist lower middle classes, from which he had
sprung, kept him from demonstrating, by seizing his desired prize in his
arms.

He was frankly in love, and meant to leave no stone unturned to oust
John Derringham from his position as _fiance_ of the lady--John
Derringham, whom he hated from the innermost core of his heart!

Mrs. Cricklander fenced with him admirably. She did not need Arabella's
coachings in her dealings with him; he was quite uncultured, and
infinitely more appreciated what her old father had been used to call
her "horse sense" than he would have done her finest rhapsody upon
Nietzsche. Mrs. Cricklander had indeed with him that delightful sense of
rest and ceasing from toil that being herself gave. She felt she could
launch forth into as free a naturalness as if she had been selling
little pigs' feet in her grandfather's original shop. And all to a man
who was rising--rising in that great country of England, where some day
he might play a _role_ no less than Tallien's, and she could be "Notre
dame de Thermidor."

Arabella had once told her of this lady's story, and she felt that the
time in Bordeaux when the beautiful Therese wore the red cap of Liberty
and hung upon the arm of one who had swum in the blood of the
aristocrats, must have been an experience worth having in life. Her
study of Madame Tallien went no further; it was the lurid revolutionary
part in her career that she liked.

Mr. Hanbury-Green was very careful at first. He was quite aware that he
was only received with _empressement_ because he was successful; he knew
and appreciated the fact that Cecilia Cricklander only cared for members
of a winning side. He felt like that about people himself, and he
respected her for the way she fought to secure a footing among the hated
upper classes, and then trampled upon their necks. There were no shades
of her character which would have disgusted or dismayed him; even the
knowledge that her erudition was merely p