oes.

"It's astonishing," he said, "how little respect infirmity and age
command in these days."

"I do respect you," she insisted, "especially your infirmity of purpose.
You said you were going to ride by yourself. But, do you know, I don't
believe you are of a particularly solitary disposition; are you?"

He laughed at first, then suddenly his face fell.

"Not from choice," he said, under his breath. Her quick ear heard, and
she turned, semi-serious, questioning him with raised eyebrows.

"Nothing; I was just muttering. I've a villainous habit of muttering
mushy nothings--"

"You _did_ say something!"

"No; only ghoulish gabble; the mere murky mouthings of a meagre mind."

"You _did_. It's rude not to repeat it when I ask you."

"I didn't mean to be rude."

"Then repeat what you said to yourself."

"Do you wish me to?" he asked, raising his eyes so gravely that the
smile faded from lip and voice when she answered: "I beg your pardon,
Captain Selwyn. I did not know you were serious."

"Oh, I'm not," he returned lightly, "I'm never serious. No man who
soliloquises can be taken seriously. Don't you know, Miss Erroll, that
the crowning absurdity of all tragedy is the soliloquy?"

Her smile became delightfully uncertain; she did not quite understand
him--though her instinct warned her that, for a second, something had
menaced their understanding.

Riding forward with him through the crisp sunshine of mid-December, the
word "tragedy" still sounding in her ears, her thoughts reverted
naturally to the only tragedy besides her own which had ever come very
near to her--his own.

Could he have meant _that_? Did people mention such things after they
had happened? Did they not rather conceal them, hide them deeper and
deeper with the aid of time and the kindly years for a burial past all
recollection?

Troubled, uncomfortably intent on evading every thought or train of
ideas evoked, she put her mount to a gallop. But thought kept pace with
her.

She was, of course, aware of the situation regarding Selwyn's domestic
affairs; she could not very well have been kept long in ignorance of the
facts; so Nina had told her carefully, leaving in the young girl's mind
only a bewildered sympathy for man and wife whom a dreadful and
incomprehensible catastrophe had overtaken; only an impression of
something new and fearsome which she had hitherto been unaware of in the
world, and which was to be added to her small but, un