would do,” said Lyon, coming to the mantelpiece, and taking down his meerschaum. “You are a queer fellow, Anstruthers. I did not think you knew the girl.”

“I know her?” with a fresh sneer. “I know her well enough.”

“By Jove!” exclaimed Lyon, suddenly, as if a thought had struck him. “Then she did mean something.”

“She generally means something,” returned the other. “Such women invariably do—they mean mischief.”

“She generally does when she laughs in that way,” Lyon proceeded, incautiously. “She is generally laughing at a man, instead of with him, as she pretends to be. And when she laughed, this evening, and looked in that odd 34 style at you, I thought there was something wrong.”

34

Anstruthers turned white, the dead white of suppressed passion.

“Laugh!” he said. “She laughed?”

“You see,” explained Lyon, “she had been asking about you; and when I finished telling her what I knew, she looked at you under her eyelashes, as you stood talking to Mrs. Despard, and then she laughed; and when I asked her if she was laughing at you, she said, ‘Ah, no! Not at you, but at another gentleman of the same name, whom she had known a long time ago.’”

It was not the best thing for himself, that Hector Anstruthers could have heard. He had outlived his boyish passion, but he had not lived down the sting of it. Having had his first young faith broken, he had given faith up, as a poor mockery. He had grown cynical and sneering. Bah! Why should he cling to his old ideals of truth and purity? What need that he should strive to be worthy of visions such as they had proved themselves? What was truth after all? What was purity, in the end? What had either done for him, when he had striven after and believed in them?

The accidental death of his cousin had made 35 him a rich man, and he had given himself up to his own caprices. He had seen the world, and lived a lifetime during the last few years. What had there been to hold him back? Not love. He had done with that, he told himself. Not hope of any quiet bliss to come. If he ever married, he should marry some woman who knew what she was taking when she accepted what he had to offer.

35

And then he had gradually drifted into his artistic and literary 

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