"Poor Nibbetts!" melancholically sighed the duchess.

The incroyables—some one had called them that—were gathered at Bellingdown again for the shooting, and Nina Darling was expected at any moment.

"Nibbetts was a martyr," declared the duke. "That's what I say. Fancy his being married all those years and never whispering it!"

"We'd never have known it at all probably," declared Kitty Bellingdown, "if it hadn't been for Caryll. It was he who wrote me, you know. Nibbetts confided it to him to put a stop to his annoying Nina."

"She was barely seventeen when it happened, you know," added the duchess.

"When what happened?" asked Charlotte Grey, speaking for the first time and making her absorption in a book the excuse.

"Nina's wedding," answered his grace quickly. "Didn't you know we were talking of Nina's wedding?"

Lady Grey yawned behind her hand. Then she smiled. "I thought, perhaps, you were talking of her daughter," she returned.

"It's an adopted daughter. Didn't you know that?" rejoined the duke, reaching for the seed-cake. His tone was more petulant than usual.

"I've heard it," answered Lady Grey, "but what one hears and what one knows are not always the same."

Then the duchess came to the defense. "Why, the child's barely ten," she said.

"They say she looks older—old enough to be fourteen."

"She's large for her age, it's true," the duchess came back bitingly; "but no one with eyes could take her for more than twelve."

"Where did Nina find her?" asked Sir George in an effort to ameliorate his wife's evident discomfiture.

"Wait until she comes and then ask her, Shucks," recommended the duke. "She hasn't told us. I say, Doody, Nina hasn't told us where she got the child, has she?"

"I doubt she's told any one—or will," agreed the duchess.

"But isn't that odd?" persisted the baronet. "One would think—"

"Oh, one can think what one likes," Lady Bellingdown cut in, still pouring her tea. "But what one thinks isn't as good as what one hears very often."

"Nina's very much changed," observed Lord Bellingdown. "She is, really. Grown quite maternal, don't you know. Fancy! One would never have thought that of Nina."

"None of you ever understood Nina. I always said that. You remember I always said that, don't you, Donty?" defended the duke.

"Nina's had a very difficult life," the duchess contributed. And at that Charlotte Grey made bold to laugh.

"She's had her tragedies, yes," she said; "but she's always taken her fun where she found it. Is she expected to cheer any one up this time?"

"She'll cheer us all up," said his grace.

"But without some new man—won't she be quite lost?" Charlotte continued.

"She's bringing the man with her," announced Waltheof, who always knew. "She's bringing Andrews, that Somersetshire chap who's got a million or so, made from sheep and freestone."

"Oh, I remember him!" The duke was nibbling now, and spoke with his mouth full. "He was at Nibbetts's place that day. I remember him very well. Fine chap—young Andrews—devilish fine chap!"

"Nina will never marry, though. She's had enough," was Lady Grey's expressed opinion. "She likes the chase, but balks at the capture."

"But Nina's changed," insisted Donty Down. "You can't tell what will come next. You'd never thought of her adopting a kiddy, now would you? And yet she did. She's very much changed. She's a different Nina altogether."

"Is she bringing the kiddy along?" asked Sir George.

"Of course," said Waltheof. "Never goes anywhere without her."

"What a happy little family party!" laughed Charlotte Grey. "Mrs. Darling, Mr. Andrews, and child. Maid, valet, and governess, I suppose."

"Oh, Nina's governess herself," the duchess disclosed. "She won't trust the child to any one else."

"Didn't I tell you she'd changed?" Bellingdown repeated. "She gives the kiddy the attention she used to lavish on that black beast, Tara."

Just then the butler appeared, and every one looked up, expecting to see Mrs. Darling and her entourage following. But no one followed. Then they saw the blue envelope, and knew it was a wire.

Lady Bellingdown took it, and there wasn't a sound. The entire group was enveloped in the silence of anticipation.

"It's from Nina," announced the recipient. "She isn't coming, after all. 'Agnes seriously ill,' she says. 'Can't bring her, and won't come without her.'"

"Didn't I tell you?" asked Lord Waltheof. "She's a slave to the kiddy."

"I like that in Nina," praised the duke. "She's a fine woman—a devilishly fine woman! But Nibbetts was a martyr, just the same."

The next week the duke went up to town by himself and called at the flat in Mayfair.

"I came to see how the kiddy was," he announced, though he hardly needed to have asked a question, for Nina, he saw at a glance, was in high spirits.

"She's better, the dear," she said; "ever so much better. The doctor feared pneumonia, but it was only a bad cold. It's sweet of you to come"—at this point she kissed him—"and I'm going to let you see her as a reward."

The child was sitting up in a bed literally covered with dolls. On the head-rail was perched a pygmy parrot, which greeted the duke with: "Bon jour! Bon jour! m'sieu'!" provoking his grace to inordinate laughter, in which Miss Agnes heartily joined.

"Coco's very polite," she said. "I teach him to be polite. Papa always said that good manners were half the battle."

The duke looked at Nina. "Papa?" he questioned.

"Nibbetts," she answered frankly. "I thought you knew. She's Nibbetts's little daughter."

"Ah!" murmured the duke. Then he looked at the little girl again, and was sure he saw a resemblance. Her hair was tawny, like his, but a shade lighter, and she had his gray eyes. She seemed tall for her age, so far as he could judge; but she was undoubtedly very frail.

Later Nina told him that Agnes's mother was a young Scotch woman who had inherited a pulmonary weakness and died at the age of three and twenty.

"It makes me doubly anxious about the child," she said. "London is no climate for her."

But his grace wasn't listening very attentively.

"Nibbetts's," he kept saying—"Nibbetts's! He wasn't as much of a martyr as I thought."

Nina gave him some tea, and had one of the maids fetch some seed-cake from a very excellent bake-shop where a specialty was made of it. The duke liked it, and it put him in high good humor.

Moreover, it led him to a revelation. Nina was looking very lovely in her mourning, and he had always been very fond of her. He drew his chair close to hers and clasped her disengaged hand.

"I'm never going to Bellingdown again," he announced decisively. "They are all sharks at Bellingdown. They tear every one to pieces."

"I know they do," she returned, amused. "But what's the difference? I thought you rather enjoyed the tearing."

"They never draw the line," he said. "Friend and foe, it is all the same. The other day they were tearing you, and I won't stand for having you torn. I said as much then. But they're sure to go on, nevertheless."

Nina smiled at her champion. "What were they tearing me about?"

"They said that they believed this child was yours, and implied that you'd been keeping her in hiding for fourteen years."

"I haven't, of course. But what if she were and I had? Everybody knows now that I was married to Hal. As a matter of fact, our own little girl is buried on the island of Jersey. She died at her birth. If you'd care to go over and look at her grave I'll do my best to direct you."

The Duke of Pemberwell gasped, and nearly choked on his seed-cake.

"Gad!" he exclaimed. "I never knew of that."

"Nor anybody else," said Nina. "I foolishly made a wreck of my life, but I did not think it worth while to show the whitened, worm-bored timbers to the world. Now that I'm past thirty, however, and the only real lover and husband I ever had is dead, I don't care who knows it.

"It hasn't been a pretty story, but if it was ever put into a book it would make an interesting one, and it might point a moral."

"Thirty isn't old," his grace declared. "Why, you're ten years off your prime yet. You've another life to live."

"I feel a hundred sometimes," she replied, "and I know my heart is quite that."

"You love the child—Nibbetts's child?"

"Because he lives again in her. It's a shadowy love, you see. I shall never love another man."

"They say you'll marry this Andrews chap when the year is up."

"I suppose they do."

"But you won't?"

"I may."

"I hope so. That will be the beginning of the new life. And you'll love him, too."

"No," she insisted. "I sha'n't love him—not as he deserves to be loved. For he is very good—oh, worlds and worlds too good for this fate he craves—and deserves a younger woman—one that is not world-worn as I am! Agnes adores him. If he would only wait for her she'd—"

The duke spilled some crumbs of seed-cake on the floor.

"He's a very sensible chap, Andrews is. He don't want an infant. Donty Down says you've changed, and I believe him. You're different. You've developed. You're more desirable now than ever before. Marry Andrews. That's what I advise. You'll make him very happy."

But Nina wouldn't promise. "There's one thing about Gerald," she added. "He does rest me. I feel such a peace when he is about."

Then, in spite of his expressed decision, the duke went back to Bellingdown and told his Doody every word. And, of course, all the rest of the incroyables knew it in no time.

That same evening Andrews came up again from Bath, where business had called him.

He found Nina sitting on the balcony outside one pf the French windows, screened by greenery and bathed in the silver sheen of a moon that was nearing its noon.

He stooped and kissed her, as was his habit now, and which she had never forbidden him. Yet it was more the cool kiss of a brother than the fervid lover's kiss—a feat acquired and accomplished by practice of the most rigid control.

"You can't fancy whom I saw to-day—" he began, bursting with what he believed would prove for her an interesting experience.

"Dr. Pottow," she hazarded.

"That's very wide," he said. "I often see Dr. Pottow. I haven't seen this person in five—no, six—years."

She tried twice more and failed.

"Your friend of that summer in Simla—Mrs. Ramsay."

"My stars!" she exclaimed in astonishment. "Where? What was she doing? I thought—"

"She called on me in Bath—reminded me of that summer, and wished to sell me some shares in a paper called British Society, of which I'd never—"

Nina leaned suddenly forward and clutched his arm. "Wait!" she cried. "Wait!" She was winking and thinking very fast. She remembered reading of Mr. Ramsay's trial and sentence, and she remembered British Society and its story about the Veynols.

She recalled, too, the identity of Christian names—Mrs. Ramsay's was Sibylla, and so was Mrs. Veynol's. And they were both Americans.

"She isn't Mrs. Ramsay now?" she questioned.

"No. She's Mrs. Miles O'Connor. She said—"

But Nina wouldn't hear what she said just then. She was too busy adjusting her mind to what it all meant. So it was Jane Ramsay that, as Rosamond Veynol, had married Caryll Carleigh! And it was Sibylla Ramsay that had made all the trouble. It didn't seem possible.

"Her husband was an editor on British Society," Nina suggested. "I thought Sibylla had more ambition. And you say she—"

"He isn't her husband any more. She has been to the States and secured another divorce. It seems she bought the paper after she married him, put him in sole charge, and he gathered in all the income and spent it on Gaiety girls. She advised me to take the journal over, and with its aid secure for myself a baronetcy."

But Nina was still thinking. All she could say was: "Sibylla Ramsay—Sibylla Veynol! Poor Caryll's dreadful mother-in-law!" Then abruptly she asked: "Did she mention her daughter? You remember Jane."

"Yes. She's living with her daughter. Lady Carleigh, you know. She said her son-in-law, Sir Caryll, was extremely influential, and if I'd buy the shares he would use his influence to get me the baronetcy. As if I'd give tuppence for it!"

He paused, and Nina remained thoughtfully silent. Poor Caryll! So his mother-in-law was on his hands once more.

Gerald looked up at the moon, and a wave of sentiment swept over him. He had seen it dozens of times since that night in Simla. But it had never seemed so much the same moon as it did this night.

Probably it was because of his meeting with Mrs. Ramsay, which brought back the Simla days and nights more vividly than ever before.

On such a night as this he had asked Nina Darling to bolt with him, and she had cruelly sent him away hopeless. Since meeting her again he had let his actions rather than his words speak for him, and she had been very kind.

He didn't wish to spoil it all again—to be sent away with his new-risen hopes all a-droop. He had made up his mind to wait until Kneedrock had been a year under the gray stones of Dumphreys Abbey, but it was hard to resist the sentimental influence of this night and this moon—this Simla moon.

"I don't want Mrs. O'Connor's paper," he said at length dreamily, "or her son-in-law's influence, or a baronetcy, or anything else in all the world except—"

Nina knew those tones. She had heard them rise from many hearts in her time, and they roused her from the reverie into which she had fallen. Hitherto they had come to her as the final warning signal.

It had been her habit at this point to gird on her armor and draw her sword for the supreme blow of severance. But somehow there seemed no armor at her command now, and her sword was dulled and rusted and wouldn't fit her hand.

So she looked up at the moon, too, and in a voice that had in it the very identical tone, only very low and very soft, she echoed his last word—echoed it with the slightest questioning inflexion.

"Except?"

He was conscious of the encouragement at once, and then there was no holding him.

"Ah, I needn't tell you, dearest," he said passionately, dropping on his knees beside her. "You know—you have always known."

The words of Caryll Carleigh came back to her: "If he was dead he'd have a hold over you that would keep you straight."

She hadn't believed them then. Kneedrock had been dead, and it hadn't kept her straight—dead, that is, so far as knowledge and belief were concerned. But now everything within her told her that Carleigh was right.

She was sure she would never flirt again, or ever want to. Still, she was not sure that she could give Gerald Andrews all that he craved—all, indeed, that he deserved.

"I'm only a husk," she said dispiritedly. "I'm a poor thing to want. Once you told me my heart was a stone. It isn't even that now. I haven't any heart at all."

One arm he had slipped about her, his hand pressed above her waist. He could feel her heart pounding.

"I'll find it and keep it," he said; growing more sure.

"But it will never beat again."

"I'll make it."

"Never fast, though, I'm sure."

Then he kissed her—and it wasn't at all a brother's kiss this time.

"There!" he cried. "I've found it already. I've made it beat, too—beat fast. I'm going to keep it—forever!" And he kissed her again.

When he released her she was panting. "I wouldn't have believed it!" she gasped, her eyes shining. "You are a miracle-worker. I can feel it myself now. But don't give it back to me ever, ever!"

And then she kissed him.

For a long, long moment—she sitting, he kneeling, their cheeks warmly close—a delicious silence enwrapped them. The sweetest of all emotions was at its flood!

Eventually it was Nina who spoke, happy tears in her violet blue eyes. "I do hope you are not going to weep," she said.

THE END