important letter; I will write it before I go in. Don't wait; I know my way."

She obeyed him. Of course he had nothing to write, but he fumbled for a sheet of paper and picked up a pen. He was awake at last to the enormity of his presence here as a guest; before he had glimpsed it, now he saw it, stripped naked.

He could not go on. There was no reason why the conviction should have come to him at this moment, but it did so. As he sat there, that knowledge rose slowly to full stature before his vision like an actual figure reared in the path he had been following. It was no longer a question of Lucille's desires or his own; he could not do this thing.

He was not accustomed to intricate windings of thought, or to self-analysis. He hardly understood, as yet, what was aroused in him, or why. But he knew that he must act; that his time of passive drifting was ended. Once Lucille had reproached him with cowardice. Today, the girl in the pavilion had innocently brought the charge again. And the girl was right; it was cowardly to let a wrong grow and grow. Masterson's friend in Masterson's house! Adriance dropped the pen his clenching fingers had bent, and stood up.

The maid had gone back to that centre of approaching activities, the kitchen. Alone, Adriance went down the corridor to the drawing-room.

Mrs. Masterson was alone there, moving some introduced chairs into less conspicuous situations. The alien chairs were covered in rose-color and marred the clouded-blue effect of the room. She pushed them about with a vicious force, as though she hated the inanimate offenders; her expression was sullen and fretful.

That expression altered too quickly, when she saw Adriance standing on the threshold. He caught the skilful change that transformed it into winning plaintiveness.

"You, Tony?" she greeted him, advancing to give him her hand. "I am so glad it was no one else. _You_ know how I must contrive and make the best of what little I have. How I loathe this cramped place, and bringing chairs from bed-chambers to have enough, and all pinching----!" She glanced about her with a flare of contempt, her smooth scarlet lip lifting in a sneer.

Adriance slowly looked over the room, not very large, perhaps, yet scarcely cramped; made lovely by opalescent lamps and fragrant by the perfume of roses set in high, slender vases of rock-crystal. All one wall was smothered in the silken warmth of a Chinese rug, against whose blue 

 Prev. P 21/157 next