"Poor darling!" sighed the duchess.

The hall was forty feet wide, eighty feet long, and fifty feet high. It was banked with palms and chrysanthemums and with Michaelmas daisies in silver pots. Yet the words echoed.

"You mean—" questioned Kneedrock, frowning.

The electricity behind a million prisms up aloft was well shaded, and the six dozen candles amid the pictures and bric-À-brac were half-smothered in pink frills. Moreover, Kneedrock had just come in and was still some distance off. Yet the frown was clearly seen.

"Oh, I didn't mean Darling. I didn't mean Darling at all," the duchess corrected quickly.

"We—we were speaking of Caryll," explained Lady Bellingdown, her hand upon the teapot's handle. "We're all thinking of him, you know. He'll be here now—any minute."

"I don't see why you asked him," growled Kneedrock roughly, as was a cousin's privilege. "He'll get no comfort here."

"Nina, remember," reminded the duchess, very interested in her bread and butter.

Then the noble viscount growled at her grace. "He'll get no comfort out of Nina. She'll chew him up alive and throw back the bones, as a snake does."

"Oh dear!" put in Lady Kitty deprecatingly. "You're always so hard upon her."

"It's Nibbetts's way," soothed the duchess, looking very kindly at him. In spite of a lingering unkemptness, he was indeed a fine object to view—massive and leonine. "He always puts things a bit boldly."

"Boldly?" he echoed. "Ugh! Why, the fellow, you know, is all knocked up. Can't go anywhere. Has been off spearing fish for a month, quite alone. And then you ask him here and throw him to Nina's teeth and claws. Ha!"

A minute before the comparison was ophidian, now it was feline. He was nearly as bad as Dinghal.

The duke, who was sitting in a corner of the huge lounge, very much hunched up and nibbling seed-cake as fast as his little, lean jaws would work, spoke defensively between nibbles.

"Maybe she'll amuse him," he said thickly, his mouth full. "Nina's very amusing when she likes. She's often made me laugh. I like Nina."

"I think she's a very delightful young woman," joined in the duchess, in order that her allegiance to her great-niece might not be open to question. "We shall have her at Puddlewood this autumn. We always have her at Puddlewood."

"And she makes life very interesting. Yes, she does," added the duke before taking a fresh nibble. "I always like her to come. Don't I, Doody?"

The duchess hastened with the required confirmation.

"Yes, Pucketts always has liked—" But there her grace stopped short.

There was a slight noise at the end of the hall, and the attention of every one was at once directed toward the door. It was a fact that the entire party was on the tiptoe of expectancy. Every soul there was speculating on how Carleigh would look and how he would act.

"No," said Lady Bellingdown, speaking in the assured tone of one who knows—and yet she had paused to listen, too—"that will not be he. I heard carriage wheels a minute ago. But we've sent a car for him."

She glanced nervously about. "Really, you know," she added, "you mustn't all stare so when he does come in. You must treat him absolutely as if nothing had happened. He is so frightfully sensitive, you know."

"I should think he would be," observed Nibbetts, lounging suddenly down on a settee and speaking in his usual resonant tone that was distinctly audible far and near. "I should think he would be."

"It was really her mother," said Charlotte Gray, who hadn't read British Society and was not in the duchess's confidence. "It was all her mother. It's a very shocking story. It's Borgian. It's Medicean. It's not a bit our present Georgian. Not in the least."

She was looking at Kneedrock, but she was talking for her own amusement, since every one knew all this, and she must have been aware of it.

"It's better not to talk of it," cautioned Lady Bellingdown, by way of gentle rebuke. "Donty feels that it will be wisest not to speak of it while the poor boy is in the house."

Whereupon Lord Waltheof, from his customary place behind her chair, voicing his somewhat superior knowledge of affairs at Bellingdown, said: "He's going early Monday. It won't be a very long strain."

"Going early Monday, is he?" queried the duke, nibbling faster than ever. "That won't help much. We're all going early Monday, too."

The door at the far end of the hall opened just then to admit Sir George Grey—a handsome, slight boyish fellow, with curling chestnut hair.

"Oh, it's Shucks!" cried Charlotte, setting down her teacup and running forward to meet her husband, of whom, being still a bride, she was extremely fond.

"Those were the carriage wheels," discerned the duke, cutting into another seed-cake while his hostess was over behind the palms for a word with the newcomer. "They were Grey's wheels, Doody," he elucidated to the duchess, who was back toward him at the moment. "They were Grey's wheels."

"I hear," said the duchess.

The footman was bringing fresh tea.

"I'm late," said Sir George, coming around to the fire. "Hello, Nibbetts!"

Then he nodded generally to the others. "I got shot in the back," he went on jovially, "and they had to undress me. And then I had to dress again, of course."

"Who shot you?" asked Lady Bellingdown, with the well-bred interest of a well-bred hostess. "Were you badly shot?"

When gentlemen go shooting, to be shot is so common that no one very much minds. Even Sir George's wife, loving him as she did, managed to preserve a stoical silence. To have appeared upset would have been very bad form.

"I don't know," answered the victim. "I don't know who shot me. I was ahead with Donty Down, and I heard Donty yell, and then—there I was peppered. He vows he saw the shot coming."

"How amusing!" cried the duke, delighted. "It is amusing. Donty's always funny."

"Was he shot, too?" asked Donty's wife.

"No, he—"

The door creaked beyond and the butler came tumbling forward to whisper: "Sir Caryll Carleigh."

Then he was really there before them—the hero of the biggest harvest of talk in recent years.

There had been nothing like it since the memorable day when Nina came back from India under the protection of her cousin, the viscount, and every one had a different version of everything.

He was very pale, a slender, brown-eyed youth with his underlip twitching nervously. To all appearances he was quite scared. Still, he certainly was really there.

Naturally there was a flutter—a perfectly visible flutter—for had it not been repeatedly and authoritatively stated that this love-wreck would never be repaired and float in his own especial "swim" again?

Grenfell and the icy coast of Labrador perhaps, or a government berth in Manchuria—but never home society again. Never, never!

And now he was here. His aunt, Lady Bellingdown, hurried forward, her hands extended.

"My dear Caryll! So glad to see you again. You know every one here, I'm sure. We're all so glad to see you. So glad, you know."

He bent and kissed her hand very prettily. Then he bravely cast his big, dark eyes over the rest of the group, taking them all in, individually as well as collectively.

He knew them, every one. Yes, they were all kinsfolk or friends, whose wedding presents he had returned a month before.

It was a trying pair of seconds, through which the duke's seed-cake cheeped like a canary.

"Did you come straight from town?" Waltheof asked in a carefully careless tone. Then he remembered. Very stupid of him; but now too late to mend.

He was standing back to the fire, and the violent agitation of his coat-tails, beneath which his hands were locked, was to the observant ones sign and symbol of his embarrassment.

"I've been in Scotland for a month," returned Carleigh, coloring deeply and seeking a seat.

Every one felt that it was unpardonable in Waltheof to have said "town" to the man who was the center of its talk.

"Oh, Scotland!" exclaimed the duke, as if the fact that the boy had been there was the very remotest thing from his knowledge. "Very amusing place, Scotland. Lovely place, too, Scotland. We went there on our honeymoon. I say, Doody, that was where we went, wasn't it?"

The duchess looked daggers at her duke. Fancy having a husband so lost to the fitness of things as to mention honeymoons in the presence of one who might have been on his at the moment—but wasn't!

"One goes there for the shooting now," she said, to ease the blow. "You always go there for the shooting."

"Not the last time," denied his grace; "it was the closed season—the last time." Then he took another piece of cake.

The duchess didn't quite know whether mention of the closed season was or was not painfully pertinent. "Scotland's so gray," she said in a confidential aside to Waltheof.

Lady Bellingdown was looking beseechingly here and there, praying for some one to say something. It was Kneedrock who responded.

"I hate Scotland," he growled. "I know a girl up there that—" He broke off, leaving them to think anything, and concluded: "I wish I could keep away from the bally place."

Then Lady Bellingdown wished that he hadn't. It was positively awful! Everybody looked at everybody in furtive consternation. Her hand trembled and she spilled Carleigh's tea all over.

He had risen in expectation of nourishment and was standing beside her. With a frozen smile, as she changed saucers, she gasped:

"Nina is here. You remember her, don't you? She's a widow now, you know. Very sweet, very bright. Extremely good company."

"Was she happily married?" Caryll asked, trying to look unconcerned.

"Why—er-r—I don't know. They went out to India, and he was killed in an accident. Cleaning a gun, you know. It was never very clear how it happened. Nobody ever knew. She's in half-mourning still."

"They were not happy," contributed Kneedrock in his resounding undertone. Then he lounged close. "I know," he added sharply. "She's a tiger come human, and Darling was her prey—some of her prey."

Lady Bellingdown was trying to laugh, though not very successfully. "What awful things you say, Nibbetts!" she sighed.

Carleigh stared in silence.

"It's true," the viscount pursued. "She's a reincarnated man-eater. She likes to take chaps and tear them and maul them and drive the souls out of them with pats that they're too far gone to feel!"

Every one was listening. Carleigh's pallor had gone white as paper. But it was the whiteness of intense interest rather than of alarm.

"Oh, I say!" exclaimed the duke, swallowing hurriedly. "I say, Kneedrock! What you mean is that she's uncommonly amusing. That's so, and that's all you mean. Only you put it a bit strongly. But that's what you mean."

Nibbetts shrugged his broad, heavy shoulders.

"Have it your own way," he grumbled. "I know what I mean, and I know what I know. You just watch her eyes get narrow, and then you wait a month. They narrow when a new man appears; and in a month she's licking his blood from her paws!"

"Oh, how very rude you are!" Lady Bellingdown chided. "Really, you know, I won't have it. You sha'n't say another word. No, I won't have it!"

Carleigh looked down at his tea. A queer flush had succeeded the pallor—a flush of still livelier interest to which Kneedrock's remarks had stung him.

He wondered what a reincarnated tigress would be like. A pleasant thrill charged through him for the first time in quite five weeks.

And just then the door at the end of the hall opened and Nina Darling trod lightly in. She had been walking and still had on her hat—a hat of yellow felt with cocks' plumes sifting backward.

In her hand she carried a man's walking-stick, and by her side stalked a great black staghound.

Sir Caryll took her all in instantly. And remembering the reference to half-mourning, wondered whether it was expressed in the hound. Certainly there was no other sign, for her frock was a pale tan frieze and her boots were but a shade darker.

"I am very late," she cried, and her clear voice rang across them like a bell. "But I am forgivable. I found the quaintest little church, and I have been praying. Yes, only fancy! I've been down on my knees begging not to do wrong, because—" she looked at them all and laughed—"because I feel just like doing wrong and I don't want to."

"You'll do it," snarled Kneedrock, sotto-voce.

"You know Caryll Carleigh, don't you, dear?" asked Lady Bellingdown.

She turned her big violet eyes his way, and he, watching eagerly, saw them fold to slits, just as Kneedrock had said. And Kneedrock saw them, too.

"And you prayed to be kept from mischief, eh?" he mused. "But of course you didn't mean it."

She crossed to Carleigh's side and sat down there. "And I prayed for others, too," she told him. "For you." With a laugh. "You need it; don't you?"

"I need it," he answered shortly. "Yes, surely."

She pulled off her heavy gloves and gave them, with the stick, to the staghound, which walked gravely away at once.

"Did you walk far?" Lady Bellingdown asked.

"Rather. To the Pine Needles."

"Why, that's twelve miles," said Lord Waltheof.

"Perhaps."

Carleigh stared more frankly at her—at her head of gold, her brow of fairest ivory, set with gems of living amethyst beneath; at her long, sinuous figure, which suggested Lilith and the medieval conception of an angel as well.

When she lifted her eyes to him and smiled, he realized that it was the first really natural smile that he had encountered in a month.

Something cold within him warmed once more. The feminine then still held that which could affect him. His heart, after all, was not utterly dead.

He returned the smile, and the slits grew yet more narrow. And as they had seemed to young Andrews, on a night at Simla, and to Heaven only knows how many other men at Heaven only knows how many other places, so they seemed to him—cleft opals, with the devil splitting the hairs of the lashes that kept them from scorching a mere masculine mortal.

"I remember you as a little girl," he murmured.

"First blood," said Kneedrock, who had been listening, in a half-whisper to the duke.

"Yes, but you know she'll brace him up," returned his grace. "She really will. My word, but she's very bracing, is Nina. I like her. I always have."

"He'll be very glad to creep back, scratched and minus one ear, and marry his fiancÉe in six months," rejoined the honorable viscount with bitter cynicism.

"Do you really think so?" asked the duke.

"Think so! I know it," yawned Kneedrock. "She doesn't care who rattles the bones, once she's had the meat."