and
took a pinch of snuff.

"Where did you find it?" he enquired.

"It was found by that Mr. Marchdale," she said, "in the road, outside
the gate. You must have let it drop this morning, when you were walking
with Emilia."

"That Mr. Marchdale?" exclaimed the Cardinal. "What a coincidence."

"A coincidence--?" questioned Beatrice.

"To be sure," said he. "Was it not to Mr. Marchdale that I owed it in
the first instance?"

"Oh--? Was it? I had fancied that you owed it to me."

"Yes--but," he reminded her, whilst the lines deepened about his
humorous old mouth, "but as a reward of my virtue in conspiring with you
to convert him. And, by the way, how is his conversion progressing?"

The Cardinal looked up, with interest.

"It is not progressing at all. I think there is no chance of it,"
answered Beatrice, in a tone that seemed to imply a certain irritation.

"Oh--?" said the Cardinal.

"No," said she.

"I thought he had shown 'dispositions'?" said the Cardinal.

"That was a mistake. He has shown none. He is a very tiresome and silly
person. He is not worth converting," she declared succinctly.

"Good gracious!" said the Cardinal.

He resumed his office. But every now and again he would pause, and look
out of the window, with the frown of a man meditating something; then he
would shake his head significantly, and take snuff.

Peter tramped down the avenue, angry and sick.

Her reception of him had not only administered an instant death-blow
to his hopes as a lover, but in its ungenial aloofness it had cruelly
wounded his pride as a man. He felt snubbed and humiliated. Oh, true
enough, she had unbent a little, towards the end. But it was the look
with which she had first greeted him--it was the air with which she had
waited for him to state his errand--that stung, and rankled, and would
not be forgotten.

He was angry with her, angry with circumstances, with life, angry with
himself.

"I am a fool--and a double fool--and a triple fool," he said. "I am
a fool ever to have thought of her at all; a double fool ever to have
allowed myself to think so much of her; a triple and quadruple and
quintuple idiot ever to have imagined for a moment that anything could
come of it. I have wasted time enough. The next best thing to winning is
to know when you are beaten. I acknowledge myself beaten. I will go back
to England as soon as I can get my boxes packed."

He gazed darkly round the familiar valley, with ey