as in a fretful dispute of precedence.

Then the woman said: "Last night Lord Remon asked me to marry him, and
I declined the honor. For this place is too like Bessington--and, I
think, the past month has changed everything----"

"I thought you had forgotten Bessington," he said, "long, long ago."

"I did not ever quite forget--Oh, the garish years," she wailed, "since
then! And how I hated you, William--and yet liked you, too,--because
you were never the boy that I remembered, and people would not let you
be! And how I hated them--the huzzies! For I had to see you almost
every day, and it was never you I saw--Ah, William, come back for just
a little, little while, and be an honest boy for just the moment that
we are dying, and not an elegant fine gentleman!"

"Nay, my dear," the dramatist composedly answered, "an hour of naked
candor is at hand. Life is a masquerade where Death, it would appear,
is master of the ceremonies. Now he sounds his whistle; and we who
went about the world so long as harlequins must unmask, and for all
time put aside our abhorrence of the disheveled. For in sober verity,
this is Death who comes, Olivia,--though I had thought that at his
advent one would be afraid."

Yet apprehension of this gross and unavoidable adventure, so soon to be
endured, thrilled him, and none too lightly. It seemed unfair that
death should draw near thus sensibly, with never a twinge or ache to
herald its arrival. Why, there were fifty years of life in this fine,
nimble body but for any contretemps like that of the deplorable
present! Thus his meditations stumbled.

"Oh, William," Lady Drogheda bewailed, "it is all so big--the incurious
west, and the sea, and these rocks that were old in Noah's youth,--and
we are so little----!"

"Yes," he returned, and took her hand, because their feet were wetted
now; "the trap and its small prey are not commensurate. The stage is
set for a Homeric death-scene, and we two profane an over-ambitious
background. For who are we that Heaven should have rived the world
before time was, to trap us, and should make of the old sea a
fowling-net?" Their eyes encountered, and he said, with a strange gush
of manliness: "Yet Heaven is kind. I am bound even in honor now to
marry Mistress Araminta; and you would marry Remon in the end,
Olivia,--ah, yes! for we are merely moths, my dear, and luxury is a
disastrously brilliant lamp. But here are only you and I and the
master