hiting. Occasionally she went to bridge parties, where, if the play was
not illuminating, at least one learned a great deal about the private
life of some of the Royal and Imperial Houses. Vanessa, in a way, was
glad that Clyde had done the proper thing. She had a strong natural bias
towards respectability, though she would have preferred to have been
respectable in smarter surroundings, where her example would have done
more good. To be beyond reproach was one thing, but it would have been
nicer to have been nearer to the Park.

And then of a sudden her regard for respectability and Clyde's sense of
what was right were thrown on the scrap-heap of unnecessary things. They
had been useful and highly important in their time, but the death of
Vanessa's husband made them of no immediate moment.

The news of the altered condition of things followed Clyde with leisurely
persistence from one place of call to another, and at last ran him to a
standstill somewhere in the Orenburg Steppe. He would have found it
exceedingly difficult to analyse his feelings on receipt of the tidings.
The Fates had unexpectedly (and perhaps just a little officiously)
removed an obstacle from his path. He supposed he was overjoyed, but he
missed the feeling of elation which he had experienced some four months
ago when he had bagged a snow-leopard with a lucky shot after a day's
fruitless stalking. Of course he would go back and ask Vanessa to marry
him, but he was determined on enforcing a condition; on no account would
he desert his newer love. Vanessa would have to agree to come out into
the Wilderness with him.

The lady hailed the return of her lover with even more relief than had
been occasioned by his departure. The death of John Pennington had left
his widow in circumstances which were more straitened than ever, and the
Park had receded even from her notepaper, where it had long been retained
as a courtesy title on the principle that addresses are given to us to
conceal our whereabouts. Certainly she was more independent now than
heretofore, but independence, which means so much to many women, was of
little account to Vanessa, who came under the heading of the mere female.
She made little ado about accepting Clyde's condition, and announced
herself ready to follow him to the end of the world; as the world was
round she nourished a complacent idea that in the ordinary course of
things one would find oneself in the neighbourhood of