d turned with a quick
smile.

"Can't you manage one?" he asked.

"Well, perhaps one, if you want me to. What shall it be?"

"That thing out of '_Butterfly_,'" Eric suggested.

"I'll sing it, if you like."

As Eric sought a chair, Oakleigh looked at him, stroked his chin, sighed
gently and withdrew to the bridge-room as though he could not face
seeing them together.

3

"I want you to take this seriously," said Eric, when Barbara arrived for
dinner. "Don't try to laugh it off by saying I'm conventional; I _know_
I am. The fact is, people are beginning to talk about us. I want to
discuss what's to be done."

His earnestness kept Barbara from smiling, and, as he was worried and
ill at ease, she beckoned him to a place by her side on the sofa.

"Do you find it so intolerable to have your name joined with mine?" she
asked a little wearily.

He looked at her in perplexity. Instead of being embarrassed herself or
feeling gratitude that he was embarrassed for her reputation, she spoke
as though the gossipers had conferred a favour upon him.

"If the thing were true, it would be another matter altogether. Subject
to your parents' approval, I think the best thing would be to get a
paragraph into the papers, saying that there's no foundation for the
rumour."

"But the rumour hasn't got into the papers yet," she objected.

"I'm meeting it on every hand."

"But, if I don't mind, why should you?" she asked.

"Well, I _do_ mind. I don't like you to be 'talked about.' And I don't
care to have people saying that I'm getting you 'talked about,'" he
added with heat. "You must try to look at this from a man's point of
view. If you were my sister, and some man who had no intention of
marrying you, some man whom you had no intention of marrying----"

"You've never asked me," she interrupted.

Eric was shocked into silence. When he was fighting for her reputation,
she was once more the coquette as he remembered her at their first
meeting.

"I've thought this over, Babs, from every point of view," he went on,
with an effort keeping his temper under her look of slightly bored
amusement. "There are three ways out of the difficulty; the first is
what certain people think the most obvious--that we should make the
story true; the second is that we should contradict it publicly--it's
the easiest thing in the world to do--and the third is that we should
give up seeing each other."

He stood up with the pretence of warming