a, or anybody," said Cicely with
decision. "I think it would be silly, and silliness doesn't appeal to
me. That is why I foresee storms on the domestic horizon. After all,
Gorla has her career to think of. Do you know," she added, with a change
of tone, "I rather wish you would fall in love with Gorla; it would make
me horribly jealous, and a little jealousy is such a good tonic for any
woman who knows how to dress well. Also, Ronnie, it would prove that you
are capable of falling in love with some one, of which I've grave doubts
up to the present."

"Love is one of the few things in which the make-believe is superior to
the genuine," said Ronnie, "it lasts longer, and you get more fun out of
it, and it's easier to replace when you've done with it."

"Still, it's rather like playing with coloured paper instead of playing
with fire," objected Cicely.

A footman came round the corner with the trained silence that tactfully
contrives to make itself felt.

"Mr. Luton to see you, Madam," he announced, "shall I say you are in?"

"Mr. Luton? Oh, yes," said Cicely, "he'll probably have something to
tell us about Gorla's concert," she added, turning to Ronnie.

Tony Luton was a young man who had sprung from the people, and had taken
care that there should be no recoil. He was scarcely twenty years of
age, but a tightly packed chronicle of vicissitudes lay behind his
sprightly insouciant appearance. Since his fifteenth year he had lived,
Heaven knew how, getting sometimes a minor engagement at some minor music-
hall, sometimes a temporary job as secretary-valet-companion to a roving
invalid, dining now and then on plovers' eggs and asparagus at one of the
smarter West End restaurants, at other times devouring a kipper or a
sausage in some stuffy Edgware Road eating-house; always seemingly amused
by life, and always amusing. It is possible that somewhere in such heart
as he possessed there lurked a rankling bitterness against the hard
things of life, or a scrap of gratitude towards the one or two friends
who had helped him disinterestedly, but his most intimate associates
could not have guessed at the existence of such feelings. Tony Luton was
just a merry-eyed dancing faun, whom Fate had surrounded with streets
instead of woods, and it would have been in the highest degree inartistic
to have sounded him for a heart or a heartache.

The dancing of the faun took one day a livelier and more assured turn,
the joyousn