Carleigh, in his room before dinner that evening, took his head in his hands and wondered.

He wondered a long time, but nothing very clear resulted. Then he rebrushed his disordered hair until it was smooth and shining once more, and went down.

The dinner guests were Mr. Telborn and the Marchioness of Highshire, who happened to be legally man and wife. Both of them were exceedingly lofty personages.

"We wouldn't have come if we had known the Greys were here," the Marchioness said confidentially to Lady Bellingdown, with a slight frown as they sat waiting. "Mr. Telborn never liked him, anyway, and since the affair of—"

The marchioness rested her case there.

"Where's that old Rembrandt copy of yours now?" Telborn asked his host, fixing his glass in his eye and glaring about the room. "It used to hang over there."

"Oh, that's up in London on exhibition," writhed his lordship. "Some vow it's real, you know."

"Real—huh!" returned Telborn expressively.

"Well now, it may be real, you know," said the duke, coming forward with valor. "And if it isn't, ever so many good pictures are copies. I say, Doody, haven't we a lot of copies at Puddlewood?"

But the duchess was otherwise interested.

"You've heard about Emily, of course," she was saying, addressing the marchioness. "The poor thing's run off with the second coachman. A very nice-appearing man, I believe. But it seems that he has one wife already."

"How terrible!" exclaimed Mrs. Darling, who was sitting close to the fire, yet shivered slightly.

"People do run off sometimes," reminded Carleigh, who was standing beside her. "I don't know that it's so terrible. It settles things quickly."

"But not when the man's married; only when the woman's married," the duchess qualified. "When the woman's married it does settle things, of course; but when the man's married, it doesn't.

"I will say this—a husband left in the lurch is always much more obliging at helping to set things straight than is a woman. Think of the Betterton-Nyns! They've been waiting for ten years. So has Captain Leigh."

"I wonder why people who love one another don't bolt oftener," said Carleigh in a low voice to Nina, dragging a chair near as the duchess turned away and perching himself on its arm. "Conventionality is a very ghastly thing, with which I have less patience every hour."

"If they both want to, they generally do," she replied without smiling. "But they must both want to."

"Well, then, why don't the Betterton-Byns, or whatever's the name—I never heard of them before—do it, then?"

"Why, they have done it. They've been off for years. In Alaska or somewhere. Betterton-Nyn, not Byn, is the name they took. It's Claudius Synge and Elsie Fairweather, don't you know."

"No, I didn't know," said Carleigh, much shocked. "And who is Captain Leigh?"

"Leigh Fairweather, of course."

"Oh, of course."

After this came the dinner, and then coffee in the rose-pink picture-room, the royal blue picture-room being closed for the week to all but decorators.

Nina had slipped away, and the other women were having a thoroughly enjoyable time talking about her.

"She doesn't really want him, does she?" the marchioness asked Lady Bellingdown. "I thought that there was something very bad about him. If he's so nice, why didn't the mother marry him herself?"

"That's what every one is asking," said the duchess, noting her hostess's embarrassment. "I'm sure I think he's very nice myself. And so pathetic, too. We're going to ask him to Puddlewood later."

"I don't think that Nina will ever marry again," observed Charlotte Grey.

"And yet, you know, she'd be rather dear to marry," the duchess commented. "I always liked Nina Darling. Of course, we understand that she shouldn't. Yet she's very nice."

"Poor Colonel Darling!" sighed Lady Bellingdown reflectively.

"He's at rest now," said the duchess. "Poor soul! And yet," she added, "I did always like Nina."

"We all like her," agreed Lady Bellingdown. "And Caryll, who only came last night, is not only consoled, but desperately in love again, which is a great triumph for her particular talent."

"Yes," the marchioness agreed. "They say Caryll did have a hard time. Fancy! A mother jealous of her own daughter. Strange persons, those, Americans!"

"She almost killed Caryll," declared his aunt warmly. "The poor fellow was nearly crazed."

"He might do worse than marry Nina," the duchess decided. "There are a few years' difference in their ages, but that doesn't matter nowadays since Lady Grandison's leap in the dark. Ten years' difference there, and they're like a pair of turtle-doves."

"I know," said Lady Grey in her meditative way. "It wouldn't be bad, of course; but, then, Nina would never have him. She has her own story, you know."

"I know," said the duchess.

Nina, coming out of her own room to run back downstairs, ran into the arms of a man instead.

"Oh!" she cried in surprise; not in alarm.

"I saw you run away," laughed the right man's voice in her ear. "So I ran, too. Kiss me again and I'll make a bargain with you. Let me make all the love I please, and I'll promise not to speak of marriage again."

He had her locked fast against his breast. "You promise me something," she suggested. "Go to Harry—to Kneedrock, you know—and get him to tell you my story. You'll never want to marry me then; and I'll have a clear conscience."

"What rot! Fancy my fussing over your story! What do I care about your story?"

"But you must know it," she insisted, "because, you see, it will make it easier for both of us. After a while—when you've married that girl—you'll be glad that I was honest with you."

He was kissing her.

"I shall never marry the girl," he declared. "I shall marry you."

She laid her cheek against his shoulder. "If you marry me I shall get rid of you somehow," she whispered. "I love love, but I simply hate husbands. It won't do to marry me. You ask Kneedrock. He knows."

She could feel his heart flopping about in his bosom.

"You—you extraordinary creature!" he faltered.

"Yes, isn't it awful?" she asked. "I think myself it is shocking. But I can't help it. I am made so."

He tried to laugh and failed.

"Do you want to kiss me any more?... No?... Then step off my gown and I'll run back downstairs."

Sunday went off well. Some went to church and some didn't. Carleigh didn't. Nina didn't. They went for a walk instead.

"This is heavenly," said the man. "I'm so happy. You are an enchantress. I feel that before I met you I never knew what anything meant."

"Men all say that," she affirmed. "Men are very stupid. They get a little chain of pearly speeches together, and then they expect women to fancy that no other man ever even so much as saw a pearl before."

"Say what you please," he cried, all but caroling in his joy. "Only let me be by to hear, and let there be woods ahead where I may kiss you again."

"It's odd you should enjoy kissing me," she returned placidly. "It's droll. That's another thing I find charming in men. It's the energy with which they kiss a new woman."

Carleigh laughed heartily. "How rippingly you put it!" said he. "Come now, how many men have kissed you?"

"This year or in my whole life?"

"Either."

She considered a little and then she yawned. "I don't see the good in troubling to count. I know now that you are not really in love, so why bother further?"

"Bother further? Not really in love? What do you mean?"

"Why, my dear boy, don't get huffed. Surely even you know that a man really in love can't put up with a conversation like that. Of course, I'm asked here to cure you of the blues; not to plunge you into a fresh trap. You know that. And it's nice to see how well I do it."

"So you think I'm not really in love, eh?"

"I jolly well know you aren't."

There was a slight pause while Carleigh thought fast and furiously. Nina walked on, insouciante. He was the least of her troubles.

After a little they entered the woods. Then he finished reflecting and took up talking again.

"So you are just flirting with me?"

"Only that."

"And yet you know as well as I do that in every flirtation there lies the seed of a pure and passionate love."

She shook her head. "Not with me. My flirtations are pure, but my passionate love is all seed—gone to seed."

"The seed can be replanted," he suggested.

"More than planting must go toward my future harvest. I tell you frankly that my spade-and-harrow days are over."

"Let me spade and harrow."

"Oh, what rot it all is!" she exclaimed abruptly. "I'm so deadly weary of everything."

"Quite so," he interrupted eagerly. "So am I. We'll go away. I'll get a post somewhere. And we'll shunt all our troubles."

"I'd grow tired too soon," said Nina slowly. "You see, you wouldn't grow tired, but I should."

Carleigh hardly knew how to take that.

"I'm so interesting," she continued—"so fascinating—what you will. And a man always enjoys my talk while it's going on. But I'm tired of my own talk and want a change."

He smiled. "Keep still," he said, "and perhaps I'll give you one."

"That's a very old joke," she rebuked sorrowfully. "Oh, I can be quite certain of being bored to death with you. I mustn't consider you for a minute."

"What's to be done about me, then?"

"Oh, you will make up with the girl some day, and then—" she stopped.

"And then?"

"Oh, how you will hate yourself!"

Meanwhile—or later, between church and luncheon—Waltheof, in the billiard-room, was chalking a cue. "It will be a good lesson," he said. "He needs a shaking up."

"He'll get a shaking up," said the duke. "I say, Nibbetts, won't Carleigh get a shaking up?"

"It's wicked—all of it," declared Kneedrock gruffly. "I've never loved a woman in my life"—which was a lie—"but I've notions about things. Nina is unreasonable."

"You think so because you've never loved a woman," said Sir George.

"A woman is unreasonable because she is a woman—" began Nibbetts, but Sir George cut in before he could finish:

"And a man's unreasonable because she is a woman, too," he laughed. "Don't preach, but walk out and find them, if you feel it is really your duty to chaperon your cousin. All I can say is what I've often said before—poor Darling!"

"No, I won't go out and find them," Kneedrock refused, pitching his huge bulk down on the window seat. "It's none of my business."

"More's the pity," was Sir George's comment. "I'll tell you what I think. It ought to be your business. That's what every one of us thinks."

An ugly white look overspread the viscount's rugged visage, and the subject was dropped.

Later, however, in the privacy of his wife's room, the duke said more—much more.

"Doody, it's rotten how they go on here about dear Nina." That was how he began it. He repeated himself a great deal, and he appealed to the duchess for verification with every other sentence. But his finish was almost impassioned.

"I'm getting very sick of the whole thing, I'll be dashed if I'm not. Of course she shot her husband, or Kneedrock shot him, and of course Carleigh is in love with his fiancÉe's mother.

"But I say it's very tiresome to have to hear about 'em all the time. I'm very tired of hearing of 'em all the time. I say, Doody, you know I'm tired of hearing of 'em all the time. Don't you, Doody?"

"Yes," answered the duchess, "and I am, too. I'm sure I don't want to hear any more about them now. Do ring the bell for Olivette, and go to your room."