ve sent me to Lady Monk's.
But, Plantagenet, I hope you will forgive me if I say that no
consideration shall induce me to receive again as a guest, in my own
house, either Mrs Marsham or Mr Bott."

Mr Palliser absolutely declined to say anything on the subject on
that occasion, and the evening of Lady Monk's party in this way came
to an end.

CHAPTER LI

Bold Speculations on Murder

George Vavasor was not in a very happy mood when he left Queen Anne
Street, after having flung his gift ring under the grate. Indeed
there was much in his condition, as connected with the house which
he was leaving, which could not but make him unhappy. Alice was
engaged to be his wife, and had as yet said nothing to show that she
meditated any breach of that engagement, but she had treated him in
a way which made him long to throw her promise in her teeth. He was
a man to whom any personal slight from a woman was unendurable. To
slights from men, unless they were of a nature to provoke offence,
he was indifferent. There was no man living for whose liking or
disliking George Vavasor cared anything. But he did care much for the
good opinion, or rather for the personal favour, of any woman to whom
he had endeavoured to make himself agreeable. "I will marry you,"
Alice had said to him,--not in words, but in acts and looks, which
were plainer than words,--"I will marry you for certain reasons of my
own, which in my present condition make it seem that that arrangement
will be more convenient to me than any other that I can make; but
pray understand that there is no love mixed up with this. There is
another man whom I love;--only, for those reasons above hinted, I
do not care to marry him." It was thus that he read Alice's present
treatment of him, and he was a man who could not endure this
treatment with ease.

But though he could throw his ring under the grate in his passion, he
could not so dispose of her. That he would have done so had his hands
been free, we need not doubt. And he would have been clever enough
to do so in some manner that would have been exquisitely painful to
Alice, willing as she might be to be released from her engagement.
But he could not do this to a woman whose money he had borrowed, and
whose money he could not repay;--to a woman, more of whose money he
intended to borrow immediately. As to that latter part of it, he did
say to himself over and over again, that he would have no more of
it. As he left th