mplete
satisfaction. I don't think that I shall ever be a very black sheep but
you must look upon me as outside the fold.--I hope you will stay to
lunch. Colonel Fosbrook is bringing his sister and the Princess is
coming."

The Duchess rose to her feet. The family dignity justified itself in
her cold withdrawal.

"Thank you, Jane," she said, "I am engaged. I am glad to know, however,
that you still have one or two respectable friends."

The setting was the same only the atmosphere seemed somehow changed when
Jane received her second visitor that day. She was waiting for him in
the small sitting room into which no other visitor save members of the
family were ever invited. There was a comfortable fire burning, the
roses which had come from him a few hours before were everywhere
displayed, and Jane herself, in a soft brown velvet gown, rose to her
feet, comely and graceful, to welcome him.

"So we are immortalised!" she exclaimed, smiling.

"That wretched rag!" he replied. "I was hoping you wouldn't see it."

"Mother was here with a copy before eleven o'clock."

Tallente made a grimace.

"Have you sworn to abjure me and all my works?"

"So much so," she told him, "that I have been here waiting for you for
at least half an hour and I have put on the gown you said you liked
best. Some one said in a book I was reading last week that affection
was proved only by trifles. I have certainly never before in my life
altered my scheme of clothes to please any man."

He raised her fingers to his lips.

"You are exercising," he said, "the most wonderful gift of your sex.
You are providing an oasis--more than that, a paradise--for a
disheartened toiler. It seems that I have enemies whose very existence
I never guessed at."

"Well, does that matter very much?" she asked cheerfully. "It was one
of your late party, wasn't it, who said that the making of enemies was
the only reward of political success?"

"A cheap enough saying," Tallente sighed, "yet with the germs of truth
in it. I don't mind the allusion to a sinister rumour. The air will be
thick with them before long. The other--well, it's beneath criticism
but it hurts."

She laughed whole-heartedly.

"Andrew," she said, "for the first time in my life I am ashamed of you.
Here am I, hidebound in conventions, and I could just summon indignation
enough to send the paper down to the kitchen to be burnt. Since then I
have not even thought of it. I was far more angry