ot answer now?" she asked.

"No, not now. But I desire you to understand it some day--some day
before November. And one or two other matters that it is necessary for
you to understand. I want to explain them, Sylvia, in such a manner that
you will never be likely to forget them. And I mean to; for they are
never out of my mind, and I wish them to be as ineffaceably impressed on
yours. ... Good night."

He took her limp hand almost briskly, released it, and stepped down the
stairs as Agatha entered, cloaked, to say good night.

They kissed at parting--"life embracing death"--as Mortimer had sneered
on a similar occasion; then Sylvia, alone, stood in her bedroom, hands
linked behind her, her lovely head bent, groping with the very ghosts of
thought which eluded her, fleeing, vanishing, reappearing, to peep out
at her only to fade into nothing ere she could follow where they flitted
through the dark labyrinths of memory.

The major, craning his neck in the bay-window, saw Agatha and Quarrier
enter the big, yellow motor, and disappear behind the limousine. And it
worried him horribly, because he knew perfectly well that Quarrier had
lied to him about a jewelled collar precisely like the collar worn
by Agatha Caithness; and what to do or what to say to anybody on
the subject was, for the first time in his life, utterly beyond his
garrulous ability. So, for the first time also in his chattering
career, he held his tongue, reassured at moments, at other moments
panic-stricken lest this marriage he had engineered should go amiss, and
his ambitions be nipped at the very instant of triumphant maturity.

"This sort of thing--in your own caste--among your own kind," his
panicky thoughts ran on, "is b-bad form--rotten bad taste on both sides.
If they were married--one of them, anyway! But this isn't right; no, by
gad! it's bad taste, and no gentleman could countenance it!"

It was plain that he could, however, his only fear being that somebody
might whisper something to turn Sylvia's innocence into a terrible
wisdom which would ruin everything, and knock the underpinning from the
new tower which his inflated fancy beheld slowly growing heavenward,
surmounting the house of Belwether.

Another matter: he had violated his word, and had been caught at it by
his prospective nephew-in-law--broken his pledged word not to sell his
Amalgamated Electric holdings, and had done it. Yet, how could Plank
dominate, unless another also had d