given her.

"Aren't you perhaps boasting too soon, my self-satisfied young friend?
Your education's only just beginning."

Eric lighted a cigarette and sat down beside her. He no longer insisted
that, for health or propriety, she must go home at once; and in some
forgotten moment he had involuntarily taken off his overcoat.

"I wonder what you think you can teach me," he mused. "I wonder what you
know, to start with."

"I know life."

"A considerable subject."

"I've had considerable experience."

The clock on the mantel-piece chimed one. Neither seemed to notice it,
for Barbara was becoming autobiographical. Her story was ill-arranged
and discursive, with personal characteristics of Lord Crawleigh
sandwiched between her life at Government House, Ottawa, and a thwarted
romance between her brother and a designing American. She flitted from
her four years in India to Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, with a procession of
damaging encounters with her father as stepping-stones in the narrative.
(From her account it was Lord Crawleigh who sustained most of the
damage.) He could never shake off a certain pro-consular manner in
private life and had reduced his sons to blundering and untrustworthy
_aides-de-camp_ and his wife to a dignified but trembling squaw. Barbara
alone resisted him.

"What can he do?" she asked. "He whipped me till I was ten, but I'm too
big for that now. He can't very well lock me in my room, because the
servants would leave in a body. They adore me. If he'd tried to stop my
allowance, I should have gone on the stage--we've settled _that_ point
once and for all with Harry Manders, half-way through the stage-door of
the Hilarity. Now I've got my own money. Mind you, I _adore_ father,
and he adores me; most people adore me; but I must do what I like. _You_
see that now; but I had to shew you, I had to break my way in here by
main force."

Eric looked up in time to catch a glint in her eyes. It was unexpected
and disconcerting. He had been imagining that she was merely
over-indulged; but the glint warned him that Barbara would make a bad
enemy, cruel perhaps and unscrupulous certainly. The next moment she was
again like a child, grown haggard with fatigue; and he gave her a slice
of cake and some milk, which she accepted obediently and with a certain
surprised gratitude.

"Where d'you imagine all this is going to end?" he asked her, though the
question was addressed more to himself. "You're twenty-two,