tion.

"What do you hear from Grace?" she asked, inconsequentially. He was
sobered instantly.

"She is well; and enjoying herself, I gather from her last letter. They
are on the wing constantly, you know, and it was unusually short. They
are now headed for Venice, with a certain Lord Ellerslie in train. Do
you happen to know him?" There was a mild anxiety in his tone.

"Yare Ellerslie? Yes, I know him very well. One of England's 'best'
types; a fine gentleman of mildewed lineage. He Is immensely wealthy!"

"Oh! I say, don't rub it into a fellow!" he protested, laughingly, but
his eyes held a glitter that caught Constance's attention disagreeably.
She rather pitied Lord Ellerslie at that moment.

"Oh! he is perfectly innocuous," she hastened to assure him; "nearly
every designing mamma has given him up as impossible. His price is above
the rubies of any woman's offering!" Her lip curled scornfully. "His
_metier_ is platonics."

"And you don't believe in their possibility," he concluded, dryly. She
eyed him narrowly.

"Do you?"

"Not in their putative purity at any event. Of course, I am not a
competent authority and my circle of acquaintances is limited to people
of flesh and blood. Imagine such an absurdity as platonics between--"

"Between--?" she prompted audaciously, her seductive face close his.

"Between you and me, for instance!" he finished, calmly, his cool
demeanor betraying nothing of the seething volcano beneath that
unruffled surface. She rose somewhat precipitately and went over and
stood by the window.

Faint and eerie from the muffling mazes of some far-off coulie came
again the wolf cry. She turned shudderingly away.

"It sounds like the wail of a lost soul!"

"Calling to another affinitive soul, neither of them knowing or caring,
in the all-compensative ecstasy of their own making, that they have lost
anything at all! Do you imagine that fellow is mouthing platonics out
there?"

He had risen unconsciously and laid his hot hand on her bare arm; she
shrank from it as though it burned her and deliberately placed the table
between them. She rang the silver call bell.

"I can imagine nothing more to-night but that it is time to retire," she
said, humorously. Before he could reply, Lucindy entered, bearing a
salver on which was a glass of milk and a pitcher of water. Constance
gave him her hand in gentle dismissal.

"Go to bed, Wolf," she said, mischievously, "and dream of--of platonics,