s. You are an ass, Barker, with your complicated
calculations, as the Duke has often told you; and now it is a thousand
to one that you have ruined yourself with the Countess. She will never
take your view that it was a justifiable piece of revenge; she will only
see in it a cruel and dastardly deception, practised on a woman whose
only fault was that, not loving, she discovered her mistake in time. A
man should rejoice when a woman draws back from an engagement,
reflecting what his life might have been had she not done so.

But Barker's face was sickly with disappointment as he drove away, and
he could hardly collect himself enough to determine what was best to be
done. However, after a time he came to the conclusion that a letter must
be written of humble apology, accompanied by a few very expensive
flowers, and followed after a week's interval by a visit. She could not
mean to break off all acquaintance with him for so slight a cause. She
would relent and see him again, and then he would put over on the other
tack. He had made a mistake--very naturally, too--because she was always
so reluctant to give her own individual views about anything. A mistake
could be repaired, he thought, without any serious difficulty.

And so the next morning Margaret received some flowers and a note, a
very gentlemanly note, expressive of profound regret that anything he
could have said, and so forth, and so forth. And Margaret, whose strong
temper sometimes made her act hastily, even when acting rightly, said to
herself that she had maltreated the poor little beast, and would see him
if he called again. That was how she expressed it, showing that to some
extent Barker had succeeded in producing a feeling of pity in her
mind--though it was a very different sort of pity from what he would
have wished. Meanwhile Margaret returned to New York, where she saw her
brother-in-law occasionally, and comforted him with the assurance that
when his hundred napoleons were at an end, she would take care of him.
And Nicholas, who was a gentleman, like his dead brother, proud and
fierce, lived economically in a small hotel, and wrote magazine articles
describing the state of his unhappy country.

Then Barker called and was admitted, Miss Skeat being present, and his
face expressed a whole volume of apology, while he talked briskly of
current topics; and so he gradually regained the footing he had lost. At
all events he thought so, not knowing that thou