ey."

It appeared from the chorus which followed that everyone present knew
her more or less.

"I should think she is plain!" exclaimed Kitty heartily.

"Yes, she'd need to be very well gilded," commented her husband.

"You're all rather severe, aren't you?" suggested Lord St. John.
"After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

"Not with an artist," asserted Nan promptly. "He can't see beauty
where there isn't any."

To the depths of her soul she felt that this was true, and inwardly she
recoiled violently from the idea of Maryon's marriage. She had been
bitterly hurt by his treatment of her, but to a certain extent she had
been able to envisage the whole affair from his point of view and to
understand it.

A rising young artist, if he wishes to succeed, cannot afford to hamper
himself with a wife and contend with the endless sordid details of
housekeeping conducted on a necessarily economical scale. It slowly
but surely deadens the artist in him--the delicate creative inspiration
that is so easily smothered by material cares and worries. Nan refused
to blame Maryon simply because he had not married her then and there.
But she could not forgive him for deliberately seeking her out and
laying on her that strange fascination of his when, in his own heart,
he must have known that he would always ultimately place his art before
love.

And that he should marry Lady Beverley, a thoroughly commonplace woman
hung round with the money her late husband had bequeathed her, Maryon's
very antithesis in all that pertained to the beautiful--this sickened
her. It seemed to her as though he were yielding his birthright in
exchange for a mess of pottage.

Where was his self-respect that he could do this thing? The high
courage of the artist to conquer single-handed? Not only had he
trampled on the love which he professed to have borne her--and which,
in her innermost heart, she knew he _had_ borne her--but he was
trampling on everything else in life that mattered. She felt that his
projected marriage with Lady Beverley was like the sale of a soul.

When lunch was over, the whole party adjourned to the terrace for
coffee, and as soon as she decently could after the performance of this
sacred rite, Nan escaped into the rose-garden by herself, there to
wrestle with the thoughts to which Ralph's carelessly uttered news had
given rise.

They were rather bitter thoughts. She was aware of an odd sense of
loss, fo