"She did. Much love and some kodaks of the children. Your god-child is
a love."

"H'm. And how is the horrid little adopted one?"

"Poor Pammy!"

"Now _will_ you look at Lady Agnes Blundell spilling coffee all over my
carpet. She did the same thing the other night at the Beaufoys'! I
really believe the woman drinks, or something. What were you saying, my
dear? Oh, how is your young man?"

Brigit did not smile. To-morrow was coming.

"I--I haven't seen any young men since I got back, Duchess."

"Oh, well, you tell him from me that his father is a wretch. Is there a
wife? I think someone said there was--well, she probably doesn't know
all _I_ know." The old woman pulled down her mouth in comic disapproval.

"What--is it?" queried Brigit.

"Oh, nothing, only--a very beautiful foreign actress, a lady famous for
her--plastic beauties. Voisin, my hairdresser--you know Voisin?
Delightful person, and the most indiscreet man in London--tells me they
dined together every evening at a little French place near Leicester
Square, where _he_ dines. And it appears your future papa-in-law was
furiously _épris_, or still is--possibly! You will have to keep him in
order. What is it, Bishop?"

The butler, whose name, the Duchess had been known to declare, explained
why no Anglican or other prelate ever dined or lunched with her--"It is
so confusing, my dear; suppose I should say 'Bishop, see if Mrs.
Snooks' carriage has come'"--came quietly up to the sofa. "Her
ladyship's carriage, your Grace."

Brigit rose. "Yes, I fear I must run away. Thanks so much for having
me----"

And when the men came in she had gone.

When she reached Golden Square she found the house in a blaze of light,
and smiled. It was like Joyselle to celebrate her return by illuminating
his every window; it would have been like him to put up a triumphal
arch; to have a big supper awaiting her; these things belonged to the
side of his nature that clamoured for expression in white satin ties.

For a moment she sat still in the motor, while the footman held the door
open.

"Come back at half-past eleven, Jarvis," she told the man, and got out.

The door was opened by Toinon, somewhat to Brigit's surprise--for it
would have been more like Joyselle to rush downstairs on hearing her
motor stop, but the reason was soon plainly comprehensible, for Joyselle
was playing. It was evidently earlier than they had expected her.
Slipping off her cloak and with a finger to her lips, she went quietly
upstairs and stood leaning against the side of the door.

It was wild music that she heard; music that made the blood in her
temples and throat pulse harder than ever. Breathing deep, she waited
for the climax, and when it came, quietly opened the door.

She had chosen her moment well, and as the door faced a long mirror
between the windows she saw, as she stood on the threshold, not only
Joyselle, who, alone in the room, stood staring in amazement, but also
that at which he stared--herself. Clad in a dress made apparently
entirely of flexible dull gold scales, the long lines of her figure
unbroken by any belt or trimming, the woman in the glass stood smiling
like a witch of old, a deep colour in her cheeks, the palms of her hands
held down by her side, the fingers outspread and slightly lifted as if
in water. Quite silently she stood and smiled until the man before her
dropped his violin--for the first time, she knew instinctively, in his
life.

Then she spoke, saying his name, the name by which the world knew him:
"_Joyselle._"

"_Mon Dieu!_" he returned softly. Coming slowly forward he caught her
hand with clumsy haste and kissed it. Her heart stopped its mad beating,
for she had won. Here was no Beau-papa. Here was the man, Victor
Joyselle.




CHAPTER FOUR


"I did not know you," he said. "I thought--_juste ciel_, how do I know
what I thought? You are so beautiful, I----"

She laughed gently. "Beau-papa! Beau-papa! Where is Théo?"

For she knew now that she would not break her engagement to-night. The
end was not yet. And by the strange laws that govern things emotional
between men and women, her self-control, hitherto utterly lamed by his
presence, was now, in face of his involuntary, as yet evidently
unconscious awakening, restored to her tenfold strong. She could have
spent weeks alone with the man without betraying her secret, now that
she had established her power over him. It had been his acceptance of
the fact of her future relationship to him, his unexpressed feeling that
she was a being of another generation, his tacit refusal to see in her
the woman _per se_, that had beaten her. Now she had, by the plain
assertion of her beauty, the enforcing of the appreciation of it as a
thing appertaining to her as a woman, not a daughter, got the reins--and
the whip--into her own hands.

"Where," she repeated, still smiling, "is Théo?"

"He is in his room; he will come--ah, _mon Dieu_!" Kneeling by his
violin, which luckily had fallen on a bearskin, he took it up and
looked at it shamefacedly. "See what you made me do," he said to Brigit,
"you and your golden dress! _Mon pauvre_ Amati."

She continued to look at him in silence, her instinct telling her that
the strange smile she had seen on the face of the woman in the glass
could not be beaten for purposes of subjugation. She continued to look
and smile, but she was sorry for him, even while every fibre in her
thrilled with triumph.

He realised her now; if she wanted him to love her, he would.

"Will you call Théo?" she asked as he rose. Without a word he left the
room, and a few moments later Théo's arms were around her, his fresh
lips on hers.

The boy was so happy, so incoherently, innocently jubilant, that if she
had in her room for another feeling, it would have been one of pity for
him. But there was no room. She was filled with triumph, and a full
vessel can contain not one drop more of however precious a liquid.

"_Ma Brigitte--mon adorée--que je t'ai desirée!_" stammered the boy.
"Why did you stay so long? Why was it so long? But, now, it is over and
you are here. You have come to me--you, a queen to her slave!"

His delightful face was wet with unconscious tears as they sat together,
and his voice trembled. For a moment she wished she could love him. It
would be so much more fitting, so much better--and then the demon in
her laughed. No. It was his father she loved, and who, if she chose,
should love her.

Madame Joyselle came in, splendid in a new brown silk dress that fitted
her as its skin fits a ripe grape, her face beaming with joy in her
son's joy. She gazed in amazement at Brigit before the younger woman
bent and kissed her, and then sat down and folded her hands, as was her
way.

"You look like a beautiful dragon--doesn't she, Théo?" she asked,
"doesn't she, Victor?"

Joyselle had returned with a look of having just brushed his hair. He
looked smoothed down in some way and was a little pale.

"My faith, she does, _ma vieille_," he returned. "When she opened the
door I was so startled that I--guess what I did, children? Dropped the
Amati!" When they had stopped exclaiming he went on, gradually, but with
a perceptible effort getting back his usual tone, "and stood and gasped
like a young prince in a fairy-tale, didn't I, Most Beautiful?"

She smiled, but she was not pleased. "You did--Beau-papa," she answered.
"I didn't know I was so beautiful. I have been dining out, hence the
dragon's skin. It is a nice frock, isn't it?" she ended, artistically
casual.

And then there were questions to be asked, stories to be told, and an
hour and a half passed like five minutes.

No more was said about the length of her untimely visit to Italy, but
much about the days in the near future. Would she go to see "Peter Pan"
the next night? And would she dine first at a little restaurant, where
the cooking was a thing to dream of?

And would she do several other things?

She would. She would do all these things. But--she would not go to a
certain little restaurant near Leicester Square, of which she had heard.
Joyselle blushed scarlet and for a moment looked as though he intended
to thunder out a severe reproof at her. Then she smiled at him with
narrowed eyes, and he said nothing.

At about half-past eleven an idea occurred to her. She wanted an omelet.
Like the first time. And she must borrow an apron and help make the
omelet; and it must be full of little savoury green things, and be
flopped in the long-handled frying-pan.

"But your dress!" cried Madame Joyselle, in horror.

"An apron, and I will twist up the tail of the dragon and pin it at the
waist, and--oh, come, come, come, it will be such fun!"

Down the stairs they ran, the three, leaving Madame Joyselle to turn out
all but one light, and to put another log on the dying fire.

Filled by the relentless spirit of coquetry that had suddenly awakened
in her, Brigit Mead danced about the great white kitchen, teasing
Joyselle, making love to his wife, laughing openly at Théo's admiration.
She, always so silent, chattered like a magpie; she, the uninterested,
flushed with intoxicating nonsense; the three people before her were her
audience, and she played to them individually, a different _rôle_ for
each; they were her slaves, and she piped her magic music to them until
they were literally dazed. Then, suddenly, she whisked off her blue
apron and unpinned the dragon's tail.

"The omelet was good," she said, "but it is eaten. And it is to-morrow
morning and the motor will be frozen. Come, _mon maître_, play one
beautiful thing to me before I fly away from you--something very
beautiful that I may dream of it."

And he played to her as she had never heard him. If the omelet had been
a magic wine, he could not have been more inspired!

His face took on the look it usually wore while he played, and solemnly
and reverently he stood, his eyes half shut, him mouth set in noble
lines. He had forgotten Brigit, but sub-consciously he was playing for
her, and she knew it, and appreciated the tribute, which was all the
greater because offered without intent.

She watched him unceasingly, and gradually, as the music went on, her
heart sank, and she realised that she had done a most unworthy thing.
The feeling she had had that last evening at home came back to her, the
feeling that he was a child in horrible danger. Only this time it was
she who had deliberately led him into the danger. And his
unconsciousness of his peril hurt her so, that as he stopped playing she
could have cried to him to go away, to run to the ends of the earth,
where she could not reach him.

"You liked it?" he asked gently, and the question seemed so
pathetically inadequate, and so plainly emphasised the innocence of his
mind, that tears came to her eyes.

"Yes," she said in a very quiet voice, "thank you, dear papa." But this
time there was no malice in the term, and when she said good-night to
him at the motor door, it was simply and filially. Then she turned to
Théo, and he, looking hastily up and down the quiet street, put his head
in at the window and kissed her.




CHAPTER FIVE


And that was the beginning of a most extraordinary phase of Brigit
Mead's life.

For the next four months she saw Joyselle almost daily. She never
broached the subject of her engagement being broken, its permanence was
taken for granted by everyone, and Tommy's indefinitely prolonged visit
to Golden Square would, if anything more than the fact of her engagement
had been necessary, have explained her constant presence there.

Once Théo had urged her to set their wedding-day, but she had put him
off and he had never again opened the question. That the young man was
not, could not possibly be, perfectly satisfied with the state of
affairs, she knew very well, but that, she told herself, she could not
help.

She lived on from day to day, more simply and with less self-analysis,
in spite of her curious position, than ever before in her life, for the
inevitable day of reckoning seemed to be the affair of the Brigit of the
future, whereas the Brigit of each day was concerned only with those
particular twenty-four hours. It was enough to live in close
companionship with the man she loved, and when, as occasionally she
tried to do, she reasoned to herself about it, her mind seemed paralysed
and utterly refused to make plans of any kind. So, twisting to her own
purposes, as people do, the saying about the evil of the day being unto
itself sufficient, she let time slip away unremarked and spring came.

It was a cold rainy season that year, with chill dark mornings and
flickerings of pale sunshine later on.

People talked much about the weather, and pretty women shivered in their
light finery. Tommy, who went home for a fortnight in April, reported
that things in the country were deplorable.

"Everyone has colds, and Mr. Smith says there is diphtheria at Spinny
Major. Green is disgusted, and from what I can gather from his cheery
reports, everyone is going to be ruined by agricultural depression. The
Mother of Hundreds has nine new pups--rather good ones."

This was at the end of April, and Lord Kingsmead was coiled in a big
chair in his sister's room in Pont Street. Mr. Babington, his tutor, had
just gone for a walk, poor man. Tommy's attitude to him had from the
first been one of polite tolerance, and Mr. Babington's bump of humour
being imperfectly developed, he in return regarded his charge with
something like horror.

A boy of twelve, who knew only the very first principles of Latin (Mr.
Babington was number three, the other two having proved unsatisfactory
to their employer-pupil), and knew the multiplication table only up to
"eight-times," disturbed his tidy little mind. There was, moreover, a
youth in Sydenham who clamoured for Mr. Babington, and who was after
that much-tried young Oxonian's heart. But Mr. Babington stayed on,
for--there was Brigit, and in the evenings the tutor locked his door,
smoked asthma cigarettes, and wrote sonnets by the yard to the
Enchantress.

Tommy, of course, had at once perceived the first shoots of the hapless
young man's baby passion as it sprang up in his heart--which did not
make it easier to bear, but still Mr. Babington stayed on.

"He'll never go, Bick," complained Tommy that afternoon, after his
remarks on Kingsmead. "I even tried smoking the other day, but he had a
handkerchief of yours that you left on the hall table, and was so bucked
that he barely noticed my iniquity. He _is_ a poisonous person!"

"Yes, I certainly preferred Mr. Catt--but you didn't like him either."

"How could anyone like a fellow named Catt? I nearly choked every time I
had to speak to him, and so did the Master." It was thus that the boy
designated and addressed Joyselle. "He used to call him Minet. I have
learned that rotten old multiplication-table, however, and Latin is
easy. I do wish," he went on, gnawing at an ancient bit of almond-rock
that he had acquired at the village sweetstuff shop at home, "that
mother had had me well whacked when I was a kid. It would have saved me
no end of trouble now."

Brigit laughed as she dabbed some cherry-coloured grease on her pointed
nails. "Poor old Tommy!"

The almond-rock was an impediment to fluency of conversation, but after
a moment Tommy mastered it and went on. "I say, Bicky, what's gone wrong
with Carron?"

She started. "I--why do you ask?"

"Because I think he looks very ill. Saw him yesterday as I went out, and
hardly knew him."

"Perhaps he's had influenza," she suggested.

She had not seen the man for weeks. He had been away several times, and
when he had come to the house had not asked for her. The last time they
had met they had, of course, quarrelled, and then she had forgotten him,
as she forgot everybody and everything not brought directly under her
notice.

In March he had gone to Monte Carlo to see her mother, who was visiting
there, and Lady Kingsmead had told her afterwards that he had been
wretched all during his stay. Brigit said she was sorry, but it is to be
doubted if the afflictions of anyone, if not directly affecting herself,
would at that time have given her any pain, and of all people poor
Carron was probably the last with whom she could feel any real sympathy.

Tommy had a bad throat and was not to go back to Golden Square that
night, but Brigit was dining somewhere with the two Joyselle men, and
was to spend the night in the now so-familiar spare-room, with the
coloured religious pictures on the walls.

Lady Kingsmead had returned to town that morning, but the perfect
freedom she gained by Tommy's long stay with, and her daughter's daily
visits to, the Joyselles, had long since overcome her first scruples
about "those sort of people being after all quite the associates for
Kingsmead," and had accepted Brigit's announcement for her intention
with an absent nod.

"Very well, dear, and remind him not to forget that he is dining here on
Tuesday. He really is _most_ obliging, about playing, I must say."

"Yes, the poor creature has his qualities," returned the girl, drily.
Twice during the past twelve weeks she had gone to Kingsmead for a day
or two, and on each occasion her note, written to the violinist at her
mother's suggestion, asking him down to dine and spend the night, had
met with telegraphic acceptance.

"Good-bye, little brother."

"Good-bye, Bicky, give him my love." Tommy's small eyes beamed with
fanatical affection, and Brigit kissed him again.

Then she went downstairs, picked up a passing hansom, and sped to
Paradise.




CHAPTER SIX


Félicie Louise Marie Joyselle was sitting in her bedroom, darning her
husband's socks.

She sat in a straight-backed chair near the dressing-table, and a huge
basket of mending of different kinds stood on the floor by her side. The
room was very simple, for she loved the well-polished black-walnut
furniture among which she had lived all her married life, and nothing
would have induced her to change it for new, however beautiful.

The walls were adorned with religious prints, but on the space over the
dressing-table, with its array of ebony and silver hair-brushes, was a
group of old, faded photographs, evidently all of the same
person--Joyselle; and over the chimney-piece hung four large oval
photographs, in varnished black frames, picked out with narrow red
stripes; quite evidently four middle-aged peasants in their best attire.
Near the door a coloured crayon of Théo at the age of five, in plaid
trousers, a short jacket, and a wide collar of crochetted lace, smiled
sheepishly down at the world. There was a table covered with books of
the kind whose gilt edges invariably stick together, because they are
never opened, and on the little table on the left of the broad bed, with
its scarlet counterpane and huge, soft-looking pillows, were an old
black crucifix and two shabby prayer-books.

It was a plain, inartistic room, and the middle-aged woman whose holy
of holies it had been for fifteen years was as old-fashioned and
unbeautiful as it; yet there was, somehow, about the place a certain
atmosphere of goodness and peace that cannot be described in words.

When Brigit Mead came in that afternoon she kissed Madame Joyselle as
usual, and then taking off her hat and coat, drew up another
stiff-backed chair and sat down.

"How are you, _petite mère_?" she asked gently, in French.

"I am well, as I always am, thank God. And you? And Tommy?"

"Tommy has a bad throat, but it is nothing. He sent his love. I am very
fit."

Madame Joyselle cut her cotton, scrutinised her work closely, and laid
the sock down and took up another.

"Such a man for wearing out socks. And always the heels," she remarked.
"It would try the patience of anyone!"

"Does it try even yours?" asked Brigit.

The little woman looked up, her shrewd black eyes twinkling under their
well-defined brows. "You have observed, then, that I am patient? But
yes, my dear, God help the wife of an artist if she is not! He is
terrible, my man, at times, but luckily I was born long-suffering. He
has, too, a way of wrenching at button-holes in collars that tears them
to bits, and desolates me."

"But----" began the girl, and then stopped.

All things considered, there was remarkably little constraint in her
feelings for this good woman, but somehow at that moment she wished to
change the subject.

Madame Joyselle, however, gave a gentle chuckle, and continued: "He was
his most terrific yesterday! Like a lion with no self-control; it was
very ridiculous."

Brigit started. Terrible, yes, but--it struck her as very unfitting for
the great man's plain little wife to find him ridiculous. And Félicité,
as her husband always called her, saw her start, and understood.

"Ah, yes, to you he is the great artist as well as Théo's
father--_hein_? To me he is, of course, just--my husband. All men are,
they say, different, but surely all husbands are much alike."

"There are certainly very few men like--_him_." Brigit took a sock out
of the basket and looked at it absently. There was a short silence,
during which Félicité did not speak, but she was watching her visitor in
the glass. Then she said suddenly, with a certain briskness in her
voice, "Shall I tell you about him? About my husband, you know, not
about the great artist of--all you others."

Brigit nodded. "Yes, please do. Tell me about--long ago, in Normandy."

"_Bien._ It will interest you. You like him very much, don't you?" she
added, suddenly, looking up and fixing the girl with her bright eyes.

"Like him? Indeed I do. I think him simply glorious," was the answer,
given in a gushing voice, but for a moment the girl felt vaguely uneasy.
During the last twelve weeks she had not, although seeing Joyselle's
wife every day, learned to regard her as a real factor in the game.
Joyselle, always tender and considerate of her, yet seemed to regard her
as a kind of cross between a mother and a nurse, and she, never
precisely retiring, and almost always present during Brigit's visits,
appeared to be perfectly used to the _rôle_ that he assigned her, and
sat, usually silent, a kindly spectator of whatever might be going on.

This was the first time that Brigit had realised that she had a real
personality, and the girl wondered at her own blindness, for every line
in Madame Joyselle's face meant, she now saw, an individuality stronger
rather than weaker than the average woman's, even in these days of
clamorous individualism.

"Do tell me about him--when he was young," Lady Brigit Mead continued,
her thick-looking white eyelids, eyelids that the hapless Mr. Babington
compared in his twenty-second sonnet to magnolia-petals, drooping till
her lashes made shadows on her cheeks.

And Félicité Joyselle told her story.

"He lived at St. Pol--a mile from Falaise on the way to Caen. His father
was gamekeeper to M. de Cérisay. My father, Jacques Rion,--there is his
picture to the right, with the beard,--was a tanner in Falaise. We were
all poor, but it was very pleasant. Falaise is a beautiful city.
Sometimes I used to think there was nothing so beautiful in London as
the Place St. Gervais on a market-day in summer, with the fountain
playing, and all the friendly people selling their wares. But that," she
added simply, "was before I had seen the Albert Memorial. Victor's
mother used to sell her fruit in the town, and her sister had married my
uncle, anyway! and Victor used to come with her. The first time I
remember seeing him, however, was at Mass. It was winter, and very cold,
and he kept blowing his hands to warm them. I was twelve, and he about
ten. He was a beautiful little boy. Then one day his father brought him
to see his aunt--who had married Monsieur Chalumeau, my uncle, you
see?--and I was there. And we went up to the castle. You have been
there? It is where the Conqueror--who conquered England--was born, in a
tiny little stone room high above the tower. You know the story of
Arlette?" Brigit nodded, but she did not know. She wanted to hear about
Joyselle.

"_Bon._ And then, when I was twenty, and he eighteen, he came back from
Rouen where, did I tell you?--M. de Cérisay had sent him to learn to
play the violin--and he told me he wanted me to marry him. He was very
splendid then, with city clothes, and oil on his hair, and his hands
smooth as a gentleman's.

"We were married at St. Gervais. Then he went back to Rouen and he
studied again. That," she added, "was the worst time of my life."

"But why?"

The elder woman looked up. "Because--I was just getting to know him,"
she returned slowly, "and--he was very wild."

Brigit nodded sympathetically. "Poor you," she said in English.

"Yes. The music made him half-mad, and then he had friends who taught
him to gamble. There were other things, too. Women. He was so handsome
and so fascinating, and his success was just beginning, they all ran
after him, and he enjoyed it. I," she added, "didn't. Then we went to
Paris. That was bad, too, only Théo was on the way, which made things
better. He was good to me during my illness--ah, very good; and
beautiful it was to see the big strong man, mad with his music and his
success, washing the little baby and dressing him. When Théo was
two--Victor had been working with his violin since he was fourteen--we
went to Berlin, and then began his craze for work. He used to work four
and five hours at a time for months. Once his health gave way, and we
were very poor, so he went to some place for a cure, and the little one
and I stayed at home. Then he met a great Prince,--I can never remember
his name,--and he invited us to stay with him. It was in a big castle
near Munich. Victor loved it, but I was very miserable. I never went
anywhere with him again."

"Why were you miserable, _petite mère_?" Brigit's voice was very gentle;
she seemed to see the young violinist, handsome and, as his wife put it,
driven half-mad by his music, the centre of attraction at the German
castle, and his little plain wife sitting forlorn by herself, looking
on.

"It was a Lady Créfinne Cranewitz,"--this name at least, she remembered!
"This Créfinne (it means countess) was very beautiful, but too big;
large all over like a statue, and blond. She used to wear one flower in
her bosom at dinner, and then give it to him afterwards. Also she gave
him a lock of her hair."

"And what did he give her?"

Félicité smiled placidly. "He gave her--his love. Ah, yes, he loved her,
his Créfinne Gigantesque."

"But----"

The teller of the tale drew a blue silk sock over her hand and poked at
the hole in its heel with a thoughtful needle. "He always loves
them--for the time, my dear. He is of a sincerity, my man!"

Since the evening of the dragon-skin frock Brigit had done nothing to
charm Joyselle; he saw her through his own eyes now, and she, knowing
that the game was in her own hands, could afford to wait; when the day
came when she wanted to hurt him or to further gratify her own love, she
could make him love her almost in a moment. So, so far as she knew, he
still enjoyed her beauty without _arrière pensée_, although he saw her
through his own eyes, not Théo's. Yet now, at this phrase of his wife's,
"He always loves them--for the time," she started, half angrily.
When--if--the day came when he loved her, would this "clean old
peasant," as Carron had called her, sit and darn his socks and say to
herself--"for the time"?

"You are very--placid about it."

"Yes. In the beginning--no. Then I was jealous, and angry. But a jealous
woman is always ridiculous, my child, and men are so vain that the
implied homage upsets them. Many a woman has lost a man's love through
showing jealousy. So--in time I got used to it, and _tout passe_," she
continued comfortably.

"And you wouldn't mind now, if----" asked Brigit, her elbows on her knees,
her chin on her hands.

Madame Joyselle laughed. "_Wouldn't mind?_ Oh, _ma chère_! Just before
you came, he had a very bad turn--it was an Italian actress--a
pantomimiste, with the most beautiful arms in the world, and the face of
a vicious little boy. And he? _Épaté._ His ties wouldn't tie, he got new
shoes--fresh gloves every time he went to see her--scent, a new kind,
very expensive--he sent her flowers by the cartload, and went every
evening to see her act. Every day little mauve letters and wires from
her (he always forgot to burn them, and I was afraid Toinon might see
them), etc., etc., etc."

"And how did it end?" asked Brigit, her throat dry and hot. She hated
the pantomimiste.

"End? My faith, my dear, it is of a simplicity, the end. _You came._"

"I came----"

"Yes. And he was so delighted with his new--daughter--that he promptly
forgot his--love."

"But what did she do?"

"She made a fool of herself, poor thing; wrote, and telegraphed, and
threatened to kill herself. So we sent Théo to see her, and she quieted
down."

Brigit burst out laughing. "Sent Théo?"

"Yes. He always goes. He is very quiet and reasonable, you see."

"I see."

Madame Joyselle rose. "I must go and see about the dinner. Will you
come? Ah, yes," as they went downstairs, "they are like that, the men.
But Théo will be faithful to you, of that I am sure. He is like my
people, and then, thank God, he is not an artist!"




CHAPTER SEVEN


"Antoinette, I have something to say to you."

"So I ventured to gather from the fact that you have come to see me."

It was mid-May, and a fragrant breeze stirred the delicate curtains of
Lady Kingsmead's little drawing-room in Pont Street. There were flowers
everywhere, chiefly white lilacs, and the pale green and white chintz
and the quantities of light-hued pillows on the sofas (all of which
belonged, as yet, to Messrs. Liberty) made of the room a pleasant refuge
from the unusual heat outside. Lady Kingsmead, dressed in pale pink,
looked in the faint light very pretty as she leaned back in her deep
chair and played with the Persian cat.

Carron, upright on his small gilt chair, was pale and agitated, the
primitive feelings showing in his ravaged face looking in some way more
out of place, because he was exquisitely frock-coated and had a
fresh-blown tea-rose in his button-hole, than they would have done if he
had been shabby.