ss.

"You know," he said to Cecil Grainger, who happened to be gracing his
wife's dinner-party, "she's the sort of woman for whom a man might
consent to live in Venice."

"And she's the sort of woman," replied, "a man couldn't get to go to
Venice."

Lord Ayllington's sigh was a proof of an intimate knowledge of the world.

"I suppose not," he said. "It's always so. And there are few American
women who would throw everything overboard for a grand passion."

"You ought to see her on the beach," Mr. Grainger suggested.

"I intend to," said Ayllington. "By the way, not a few of your American
women get divorced, and keep their cake and eat it, too. It's a bit
difficult, here at Newport, for a stranger, you know."

"I'm willing to bet," declared Mr. Grainger, "that it doesn't pay. When
you're divorced and married again you've got to keep up appearances--the
first time you don't. Some of these people are working pretty hard."

Whereupon, for the Englishman's enlightenment, he recounted a little
gossip.

This, of course, was in the smoking room. In the drawing-room, Mrs.
Grainger's cousin did not escape, and the biography was the subject of
laughter.

"You see something of him, I hear," remarked Mrs. Playfair, a lady the
deficiency of whose neck was supplied by jewels, and whose conversation
sounded like liquid coming out of an inverted bottle. "Is he really
serious about the biography?"

"You'll have to ask Mr. Grainger," replied Honora.

"Hugh ought to marry," Mrs. Grenfell observed.

"Why did he come back?" inquired another who had just returned from a
prolonged residence abroad. "Was there a woman in the case?"

"Put it in the plural, and you'll be nearer right," laughed Mrs.
Grenfell, and added to Honora, "You'd best take care, my dear, he's
dangerous."

Honora seemed to be looking down on them from a great height, and to
Reginald Farwell alone is due the discovery of this altitude; his
reputation for astuteness, after that evening, was secure. He had sat
next her, and had merely put two and two together--an operation that is
probably at the root of most prophecies. More than once that summer Mr.
Farwell had taken sketches down Honora's lane, for she was on what was
known as his list of advisers: a sheepfold of ewes, some one had called
it, and he was always piqued when one of them went astray. In addition to
this, intuition told him that he had taken the name of a deity in
vain--and that deity was Chilt