d manners who believed, and
acted upon the belief, that he was the superior of most of the members of
his own family--the human race.

"I suppose I could compress myself back into being satisfied with this
sort of people and things," she thought, as she looked round the ballroom
from which pose and self-consciousness and rigid conventionality had
banished spontaneous gayety. "I suppose I could even again come to
fancying this the only life. But I certainly don't care for it now."

But, although Adelaide was thus using her eyes and her mind--her own eyes
and her own mind--in observing what was going on around her, she did not
disconcert the others, not even Janet, by expressing her thoughts. Common
sense--absolute common sense--always sounds incongruous in a conventional
atmosphere. In its milder forms it produces the effect of wit; in
stronger doses it is a violent irritant; in large quantity, it causes
those to whom it is administered to regard the person administering it as
insane. Perhaps Adelaide might have talked more or less frankly to Janet
had Janet not been so obviously in the highest of her own kind of
heavens. She was raised to this pinnacle by the devoted attentions of the
Viscount Brunais, eldest son of Saint Berthe and the most agreeable and
adaptable of men, if the smallest and homeliest. Adelaide spoke of his
intelligence to Janet, when they were alone before dinner on the fourth
day, and Janet at once responded.

"And such a soul!" she exclaimed. "He inherits all the splendid, noble
traditions of their old, _old_ family. You see in his face that he is
descended from generations of refinement and--and--freedom from contact
with vulgarizing work, don't you?"

"That hadn't struck me," said Adelaide amiably. "But he's a well-meaning,
good-hearted little man, and, of course, he feels as at home in the
surroundings he's had all his life as a bird on a bough. Who doesn't?"

"But when you know him better, when you know him as I know him--" Janet's
expression disclosed the secret.

"But won't you be lonely--away off here--among--foreign people?"
said Adelaide.

"Oh, I should _love_ it here!" exclaimed Janet. "It seems to me I--he
and I--must have lived in this very chateau in a former existence. We
have talked about it, and he agrees with me. We are _so_ harmonious."

"You've really made up your mind to--to marry him?" Adelaide had almost
said "to buy him"; she had a sense that it was her duty to disrega