good, too, as it
turned out. I think she makes too much of him. To my mind, he speaks
like a bit of consecrated stage tradition and looks like a bit of
consecrated stage furniture--he, and his thin nose, and his thin lips,
and his thin eyebrows. Personally, I'm sick of his eyebrows."

"They'll end by marrying," said Surgeon-Lieutenant-Colonel Livingstone.

"_Herbert!_ How little you know her!"

"It's possible enough," Duff said, "especially if she finds him in any
way necessary to her production of herself. Hilda has knocked about too
much to have many illusions. One is pretty sure she would place that
first."

"You are saying a thing which is monstrous!" cried Alicia.

Unperturbed, her brother supported his conviction. "She'll have to marry
him to get rid of him," he said. "Fancy the opportunities of worrying
her the brute will have in those endless ocean voyages!"

"Oh, if you think Hilda could be _worried_ into anything!" Miss
Livingstone exclaimed derisively. "If the man were irritating, do you
suppose she wouldn't arrange--wouldn't find means--?"

"She would have him put in irons, no doubt," Herbert retorted, "or
locked up with the other sad dogs, in charge of the ship's butcher."

The three laughed immoderately, and Stephen, looking up, came in at the
end with a smile. Alicia pronounced her brother too absurd, and unfitted
by nature to know anything about creatures like Hilda Howe. "A mere man
to begin with," she said. "You haven't the ghost of a temperament,
Herbert, you know you haven't."

"He's got a lovely bedside manner," Lindsay remarked, "and that's the
next thing to it."

"Rubbish! I don't want to hurry you," Alicia glanced at the watch on her
wrist, "but unless you and Herbert want to miss half the first act you
had better be off. Stephen and I will have our coffee comfortably in the
drawing-room and find what excuses we can for you."

But Stephen put out his hand with a movement of slightly rigid
deprecation.

"If it is not too vacillating of me," he said, "and I may be forgiven, I
think I will change my mind and go. I have no business to break up your
party, and besides, I shall probably not have another opportunity--I
should rather like to go. To the theatre, of course, that is. Not to
Bonsard's, thanks very much."

"Oh, do come on to Bonsard's," Lindsay said, and Alicia protested that
he would miss the best of Lady Dolly, but Stephen was firm. Bonsard's
was beyond the limit of his indu