nd quarrel in a straw.'"

Her cheeks had flushed a passionate red. The eyes which she had
inherited from her Spanish grandmother blazed above them. She had become
suddenly a woman of Andalusia and the South, moved by certain primitive
forces in the blood.

Madeleine Verrier held out her hands, smiling.

"Come here, little wild cat. I believe you are jealous of Elsie
Maddison."

Daphne approached her slowly, and slowly dropped into a seat beside her
friend, her eyes still fixed and splendid. But as she looked into them
Madeleine Verrier saw them suddenly dimmed.

"Daphne! you _are_ in love with him!"

The girl recovered herself, clenching her small hands. "If I am," she
said resolutely, "it is strange how like the other thing it is! I don't
know whether I shall speak to him to-night."

"To-night?" Mrs. Verrier looked a little puzzled.

"At the White House. You're going, of course."

"No, I am not going." The voice was quiet and cold. "I am not asked."

Daphne, vexed with herself, touched her friend's hand caressingly. "It
will be just a crush, dear. But I promised various people to go."

"And he will be there?"

"I suppose so." Daphne turned her head away, and then sprang up. "Have
you seen the picture?"

Mrs. Verrier followed her into the inner room, where the girl gave a
laughing and triumphant account of her acquisition, the agents she had
employed, the skill with which it had been conveyed out of Italy, the
wrath of various famous collectors, who had imagined that the fight lay
between them alone, when they found the prize had been ravished from
them. Madeleine Verrier was very intelligent, and the contrast, which
the story brought out, between the girl's fragile youth and the strange
and passionate sense of power which breathed from her whenever it became
a question of wealth and the use of it, was at no point lost upon her
companion.

Daphne would not allow any further talk of Roger Barnes. Her chaperon,
Mrs. Phillips, presently appeared, and passed through rather a bad
quarter of an hour while the imperious mistress of the house inquired
into certain invitations and card-leavings that had not been managed to
her liking. Then Daphne sat down to write a letter to a Girls' Club in
New York, of which she was President--where, in fact, she occasionally
took the Singing Class, with which she had made so much play at her
first meeting with Roger Barnes. She had to tell them that she had just
engaged a h