get farther and farther apart!"

She cast on him a look of startled divination. "You want Bessy to go on
spending too much money?"

"How can I help it if it costs?"

"If what costs--?" She stopped, her eyes still wide; then their glances
crossed, and she exclaimed: "If your scheme costs? It _is_ your scheme,
then?"

He shrugged his shoulders again. "It's a passive attitude----"

"Ah, the deepest plans are that!" Mr. Langhope uttered no protest, and
she continued to piece her conjectures together. "But you expect it to
lead up to something active. Do you want a rupture?"

"I want him brought back to his senses."

"Do you think that will bring him back to _her_?"

"Where the devil else will he have to go?"

Mrs. Ansell's eyes dropped toward the gardens, across which desultory
knots of people were straggling back from the ended tennis-match. "Ah,
here they all come," she said, rising with a half-sigh; and as she stood
watching the advance of the brightly-tinted groups she added slowly:
"It's ingenious--but you don't understand him."

Mr. Langhope stroked his moustache. "Perhaps not," he assented
thoughtfully. "But suppose we go in before they join us? I want to show
you a set of Ming I picked up the other day for Bessy. I flatter myself
I _do_ understand Ming."

XIV

JUSTINE BRENT, her household duties discharged, had gone upstairs to her
room, a little turret chamber projecting above the wide terrace below,
from which the sounds of lively intercourse now rose increasingly to her
window.

Bessy, she knew, would have preferred to have her remain with the party
from whom these evidences of gaiety proceeded. Mrs. Amherst had grown to
depend on her friend's nearness. She liked to feel that Justine's quick
hand and eye were always in waiting on her impulses, prompt to interpret
and execute them without any exertion of her own. Bessy combined great
zeal in the pursuit of sport--a tireless passion for the saddle, the
golf-course, the tennis-court--with an almost oriental inertia within
doors, an indolence of body and brain that made her shrink from the
active obligations of hospitality, though she had grown to depend more
and more on the distractions of a crowded house.

But Justine, though grateful, and anxious to show her gratitude, was
unwilling to add to her other duties that of joining in the amusements
of the house-party. She made no pretense of effacing herself when she
thought her presence might