Zeal, poor old chap, and her conscience
scorched her because she was always rather nasty to my grandfather--she
likes and dislikes tremendously, you know; although to most people she
is merely indifferent. But when she dislikes--" He blew the ashes from
the tip of his cigarette with a slight whistling sound.

Flora Thangue had extracted all the particulars of the death and suicide
from Lady Victoria--who knew nothing, however, of the tragic cause of
both--and imparted them to Isabel, whose mind, in consequence, was free
of morbid curiosity. She had also read the newspapers. The speculations
and veiled hints of the sensational sheets had not interested her, but
she had pondered deeply over leaders in the more dignified organs, which
had abounded in comment upon the changed conditions in the meteoric
career of the young man who was no longer Elton Gwynne, but a peer of
the realm.

"Do you mind it so awfully much?" she asked, after a short silence
during which they had both smoked absently and gazed at the fire.

"What?" Gwynne turned the cold surprise of his eyes upon her. "Losing
two of the four people I cared most for on earth?"

"Of course not. Being suddenly made a peer and having to begin all over.
You never will be called Elton Gwynne again, and you will have as much
trouble educating the public up to your new name as if you were emerging
from obscurity for the first time."

The words, brutally direct, rolled away the last clouds of his lethargy.
He vividly realized that he had been skulking before the closed shutters
of his understanding, accepting the new conditions with but the dulled
surface of his brain.

Now his naked soul stared at her out of his white face and tortured
eyes, and she looked away. She had not believed that he could be racked
with feeling of any sort, and it was as if she heard him cry: "Oh, God!
Oh, God!" although his lips were silent.

But she did not change the subject.

"I suppose you haven't seen the newspapers," she said. "I cut out all
the editorials and paragraphs I thought would interest you. One of the
big dailies, I forget which, said that the interruption of your career
was a greater political tragedy than Parnell's or Lord Randolph
Churchill's."

"Do they say that?" asked Gwynne, eagerly. "Well, God knows, it is a
tragedy for me."

"Don't you like being a peer the least little bit? I am too feminine,
possibly too American, not to see a certain picturesqueness in a title