tself. On the whole, therefore, women of
rank are perhaps best avoided in this sense. Passions are safest which
can be terminated by the cheque-book. The cheque-book is not always
indeed refused by great ladies,--when they are in debt,--but a
cheque-book is an unpleasant witness in the law courts. However, as I
said before, all depends on the lady's temper: no woman who has a bad
temper is ever truly discreet. Good-night to your Grace." And Mr.
Wootton, with his candle, disappears within his door-way.

He smiles a little blandly as his man undresses him. Five years before,
Lady Dawlish offended him at a house-party at Sandringham, taking a
fiendish pleasure in capping all his best stories and tracing the
sources of all his epigrams. In that inaccessible but indelible
note-book, his memory, he has written her name down as that of one to
whom he has a debt to pay. "_Je lui ai donne du fil a retordre_," he
thinks, as he drops into his first doze.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Alan is really coming to day!" says Dorothy Usk to her lord, with
pleasure, a few days later, looking up from a telegram.

"How you excite yourself!" says Usk, with rude disdain. "What can you
see to care about? He is a pretentious humbug, if ever there was one!"

"George!" She regards him with horror and amaze. Is he wholly out of his
mind? Her cousin is Lady Usk's ideal of what an English gentleman should
be. _He_ does not keep black women down in Warwickshire.

"A pretentious humbug," repeats Usk. He likes to ticket his relations
and connections with well-chosen descriptions. "All good looks and soft
sawder. Women like that sort of thing----"

"Of course we like good manners, though they are not your weakness,"
interrupts his wife, with acerbity. "Alan has the manners of a man who
respects women: that may seem very tame to you and your friend
Brandolin, but in these days it has at least the charm of novelty."

"Respects women!" Usk is unable to restrain his hilarity. "My dear
Dolly, you're not a chicken: you can't mean that you don't know that
Gervase----"

"I know that he is well-bred. You were so once, but it is a very long
time ago," replies his wife, with cutting sententiousness, and with that
unkind reply she leaves him. As if she did not understand men better
than he, she thinks, contemptuously. He may understand dogs and horses,
and deer and partridges, but about human nature he knows no more than
the old man at the lodge gates.

"Sur