man then walking by her side, and even now, as he was remembering
it all, the discussion was inexpressibly odious. "But do you think," he
had ventured to ask, "that Madame de Lera will consent? Remember, Peggy,
she is Catholic, and what is more, a pious Catholic."

"Of course she won't like it--of course she won't approve! But I'm
sure--in fact, Laurence, I _know_--that she will consent to forward my
letters. She understands that it would make no difference--that I should
think of some other plan for getting them. Should she refuse at the last
moment--but--but she will not refuse--" and her face--the fair,
delicately-moulded little face Vanderlyn loved--had become flooded with
colour.

For the first time since he had known her, he had realised that there
was a side to her character of which he was ignorant, and yet?--and yet
Laurence Vanderlyn knew Margaret Pargeter too well, his love of her
implied too intimate a knowledge, for him not to perceive that something
lay behind her secession from an ideal of conduct to which she had clung
so unswervingly and for such long years.

During the four days which had elapsed between then and now,--days of
agitation, of excitement, and of suspense,--he had more than once asked
himself whether it were possible that certain things which all the world
had long known concerning Tom Pargeter had only just become revealed to
Tom Pargeter's wife. He hoped, he trusted, this was not so; he had no
desire to owe her surrender to any ignoble longing for reprisal.

The world, especially that corner of Vanity Fair which takes a frankly
materialistic view of life and of life's responsibilities, is shrewder
than we generally credit, and the diplomatist's intimacy with the
Pargeter household had aroused but small comment in the strange polyglot
society in which lived, by choice, Tom Pargeter, the cosmopolitan
millionaire who was far more of a personage in Paris and in the French
sporting world than he could ever have hoped to be in England.

To all appearance Laurence Vanderlyn was as intimate with the husband as
with the wife, for he had tastes in common with them both, his interest
in sport and in horseflesh being a strong link with Tom Pargeter, while
his love of art, and his dilettante literary tastes, bound him to Peggy.
Also, and perhaps above all, he was an American--and Europeans cherish
strange and sometimes fond illusions as to your American's lack of
capacity for ordinary human emoti