ive.

"Turn in, if you want to," she said, her voice indistinct, smothered by
her pink palm. "You're to dress in Leroy's quarters."

"I don't want to turn in just yet."

"You said you needed sleep."

"I do. But it's not eleven yet."

She slipped into another posture, reaching for a cigarette, and, setting
it afire from the match he offered, exhaled a cloud of smoke and looked
dreamily through it at him.

"Who is she?" she asked in a colourless voice. "Tell me, for I don't
know. Agatha? Marion Page? Mrs. Vendenning? or the Tassel girl?"

"Nobody--yet," he admitted cheerfully.

"Nobody--yet," she repeated, musing over her cigarette. "That's good
politics, if it's true."

"Am I untruthful?" he asked simply.

"I don't know. Are you? You're a man."

"Don't talk that way, Leila."

"No, I won't. What is it that you and Sylvia Landis have to talk about
so continuously every time you meet?"

"She's merely civil to me," he explained.

"That's more than she is to a lot of people. What do you talk about?"

"I don't know--nothing in particular; mostly about Shotover, and the
people there last summer."

"Doesn't she ever mention Stephen Siward?"

"Usually. She knows I like him."

"She likes him, too," said Leila, looking at him steadily.

"I know it. Everybody likes him--or did. I do, yet."

"I do, too," observed Mrs. Mortimer coolly. "I was in love with him. He
was only a boy then."

Plank nodded in silence.

"Where is he now--do, you know?" she asked. "Everybody says he's gone to
the devil."

"He's in the country somewhere," replied Plank cautiously. "I stopped
in to see him the other day, but nobody seemed to know when he would
return."

Mrs. Mortimer tossed her cigarette onto the hearth. For a long interval
of silence she lay there in her chair, changing her position restlessly
from moment to moment; and at length she lay quite still, so long that
Plank began to think she had fallen asleep in her chair.

He rose. She did not stir, and, passing her, he instinctively glanced
down. Her cheeks, half buried against the back of the chair, were
overflushed; under the closed lids the lashes glistened wet in the
lamplight.

Surprised, embarrassed, he halted, as though afraid to move; and she sat
up with a nervous shake of her shoulders.

"What a life!" she said, under her breath; "what a life for a woman to
lead!"

"Wh-whose?" he blurted out.

"Mine!"

He stared at her uneasily, finding nothing to