knew that Kerr was watching her; watching her once
again in dubious admiration. It was a look that made Mrs. Herrick seem
ready at a movement of his to lay her hand on Flora in protection.

The lady's clear gray eyes traveled between Flora's face and his. Under
their steady light there was a strange alertness, as if she sat there
ready enough to avert whatever threatened, but anxious to draw her
skirts aside from it, distrusting the quality, hating to have come in
upon anything so dubious. When the hall door opened and closed she
listened as if for a deliverer; and when Clara appeared between the
portieres she turned to her and met her with a flash of relief, as if
here at last was a safe quantity. Clara was still wearing her hat, with
the veil pushed up in a little mist above her eyes, and still had her
white gloves on. The sight of Mrs. Herrick's hand soliciting the clasp
of those gave Flora a curious sensation.

She looked from one face to another, and last at Kerr's. She shut her
eyes an instant. Here was a thief. He was standing in her drawing-room
now. She had been talking with him. She opened her eyes. The fact
acknowledged had not altered the color of daylight. It was strange that
things--furniture and walls and landscape--should remain so stolidly the
same when such a thing had happened to her! For she had not only spoken
with a thief, but she had shielded him. It struck her grotesquely that
perhaps Mrs. Herrick's instinct was right, after all. Wasn't Clara the
safest of the lot? Clara at least kept her gloves on, while she herself
was shamelessly arrayed on the side of disorder. She was clinging to a
piece of property that wasn't hers, and whatever way she dressed her
motives they looked too much of a piece with the operations of the
original miscreant.

Flora saw the evil spirit of tragic-comedy. He fairly grinned at her.

XII

DISENCHANTMENT

Then this was the end of all romance? She must turn her back on the
charm, the power, the spell that had been wrought around her, and,
horror-struck, pry into her own mind to discover what lawless thing
could be in her to have drawn her to such a person, and to keep her,
even now that she knew the worst, unwilling to relinquish the thought of
him. His depravity loomed to her enormous; but was that all there was to
be said of him? Did his delicacy, his insight, his tempered fineness,
count for nothing beside it? Must their talks, their walking through the