can I drop you?" she asked. "At the club?"

For a second Clodagh stood, staring with very bright eyes at an open
window, across which a lace curtain hung motionless in the still, hot
air; then she lifted her head and, in her own turn, crossed the room.

"Yes," she said quietly--"yes, at the club."

Not many days later, Clodagh--in company with Lady Frances Hope--left
London for Buckinghamshire, on her promised visit to the latter's
sister--Lady Diana Tuffnell.

The house party at Tuffnell Place was to include--beside one or two men
and women of personal distinction--a small section of Lady Frances
Hope's coterie from the merely fashionable world, comprising Lord
Deerehurst, Serracauld, and Mrs. Bathurst. For although Lady Diana
Tuffnell was very uncompromising in the choice of her own friends, she
had always been a complacent sister; and Tuffnell Place generally
opened its doors during the month of July to Lady Frances Hope and her
intimates.

It was late in the evening when Clodagh arrived; and the old
Elizabethan house, with its many windows of thick, small-paned glass
and its fine oak-raftered hall, filled her with delight. After she had
been greeted by Lady Diana, and introduced to Mr. Tuffnell--a typical,
kindly English squire, who invariably went his own way straightly and
was content to assume that others did the same--she passed up the
shallow staircase and entered the room that had been allotted to her,
with a sense of something nearer to happiness than she had known for
months. In the whole air of the house and its inmates there was a
suggestion of restfulness, of friendliness, of sincerity to which she
had been long a stranger. Unconsciously she warmed and softened under
the homelike atmosphere. And when, a quarter of an hour later,
Simonetta came softly into the bright, chintz-hung bedroom, she found
her mistress busily unpacking her writing-case and sorting her letters
at an old-fashioned oak writing-table.

That night the two visitors--who had preceded the other members of the
house party by a day--dined alone with their host and hostess.

They were a very small party for the great dining-hall; but Clodagh was
conscious that at many a crowded restaurant she would have been less
well amused. There was a feeling of sincerity in the atmosphere, an
honest desire on the part of the entertainers to put their guest at her
ease, that precluded dulness and artificiality.

After dinner, Lady Frances wande