ty discontented head against the back of the chair, so that her
eyes were on a level with those of her friend, who leaned near her in
the embrasure of the window.

"I can't understand you, Justine. You know well enough what he's come
back for."

"In order to dazzle Hanaford with the fact that he has been staying at
Lynbrook!"

"Nonsense--the novelty of that has worn off. He's been here three times
since we came back."

"You are admirably hospitable to your family----"

Bessy let her pretty ringed hands fall with a discouraged gesture. "Why
do you find him so much worse than--than other people?"

Justine's eye-brows rose again. "In the same capacity? You speak as if I
had boundless opportunities of comparison."

"Well, you've Dr. Wyant!" Mrs. Amherst suddenly flung back at her.

Justine coloured under the unexpected thrust, but met her friend's eyes
steadily. "As an alternative to Westy? Well, if I were on a desert
island--but I'm not!" she concluded with a careless laugh.

Bessy frowned and sighed. "You can't mean that, of the two--?" She
paused and then went on doubtfully: "It's because he's cleverer?"

"Dr. Wyant?" Justine smiled. "It's not making an enormous claim for
him!"

"Oh, I know Westy's not brilliant; but stupid men are not always the
hardest to live with." She sighed again, and turned on Justine a glance
charged with conjugal experience.

Justine had sunk into the window-seat, her thin hands clasping her knee,
in the attitude habitual to her meditative moments. "Perhaps not," she
assented; "but I don't know that I should care for a man who made life
easy; I should want some one who made it interesting."

Bessy met this with a pitying exclamation. "Don't imagine you invented
that! Every girl thinks it. Afterwards she finds out that it's much
pleasanter to be thought interesting herself."

She spoke with a bitterness that issued strangely from her lips. It was
this bitterness which gave her soft personality the sharp edge that
Justine had felt in it on the day of their meeting at Hanaford.

The girl, at first, had tried to defend herself from these
scarcely-veiled confidences, distasteful enough in themselves, and
placing her, if she listened, in an attitude of implied disloyalty to
the man under whose roof they were spoken. But a precocious experience
of life had taught her that emotions too strong for the nature
containing them turn, by some law of spiritual chemistry, into a
rankling pois