one: how, as Leila
was standing before Tiffany's looking for her carriage, a masher
accosted her, and, at her haughty stare, said sneeringly: "Oh, you can't
play that game on me; I've seen you with Leroy Mortimer!"

The story was repeated frequently enough. Leila heard it with a shrug;
but such things mattered to her now, and she cried over it at night,
burning that Plank should hear her name used jestingly to emphasise the
depth of her husband's degradation.

Mortimer stayed out at night very frequently now. Also, he appeared
to make his money go farther, or was luckier at his "card killings,"
because he seldom attempted to bully Leila, being apparently content
with his allowance.

Once or twice Plank saw him with an unusually attractive girl belonging
to a world very far removed from Leila's. Somebody said she was
an actress when she did anything at all--one Lydia Vyse, somewhat
celebrated for an audacity not too delicate. But Plank was no more
interested than any man who can't afford to endanger his prospects by a
closer acquaintance with that sort of pretty woman.

Meanwhile Mortimer kept away from home, wife, and church, and Plank
frequented them, so the two men did not meet very often; and the less
they met the less they found to say to one another.

Now that the forty days had really begun, Major Belwether became
restless for the flesh-pots of the south, although Lenten duties sat
lightly enough upon the house of Belwether. These decent observances
were limited to a lax acknowledgment of fast days, church in moderation,
and active participation in the succession of informal affairs
calculated to sustain life in those intellectually atrophied and wealthy
people entirely dependent upon others for their amusements.

To these people no fear of punishment hereafter can equal the terror
of being left to their own devices; and so, though the opera was over,
theatres unfashionable, formal functions suspended and dances ended, the
pace still continued at a discreet and decorous trot; and those who had
not fled to California or Palm Beach, remained to pray and play Bridge
with an unction most edifying.

And all this while Sylvia had not seen Siward.

Sylvia was changing. The characteristic amiability, the sensitive
reserve, the sweet composure which the world had always counted on in
her, had become exceptions and no longer the rules which governed the
caprice and impulse always latent. An indifference so pointed