ry
like contempt for him.

And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.

She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit),
when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from
a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the
silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any
callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he
cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement--he
had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards
in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed
solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley,
Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. _That's_ all right.
I gave them three months."

And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and
his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him
keep out of it.

Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity--and I
don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there--very
spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party
they took us to.

And later on--in the very beginning of July it must have been--I see him
on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and--I didn't dream it this
time--he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity
that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting
triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph
wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said,
all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months
to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated.
Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so
as to excite a supreme curiosity--and it was being satisfied.

And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had
been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none
of us had seen it except Viola.

Oh no--it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must
have seen it. What Viola had seen--if she had seen anything--was only the
foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.

Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the
service with the rank of Captain).

And it was at the garden-party tha