startle, not guiltily, but in wonderment at her inexplicable omission. What possible reason could there be for not mentioning the man? Adrian continued to discuss Ronnie, and Ronnie's mother, and Maurice Cavendish, whom he had encountered years since at Oxford. "His son's rather like him; but of course he's got the Wixton chin," said Adrian. All the time Adrian talked, Aliette was asking herself questions. Why hadn't she even mentioned the man's name? Why? Why? Why? Harking back to her conversation, she seemed to have made the omission deliberately. She tried to laugh herself out of the absurd mood; to join in the conversation. Deliberate? Ridiculous! She just hadn't thought about him. And yet, subconsciously, the man's face rose up before her, serious and strangely vivid against the glow of the table-candles. She could almost hear his voice, "I'll give you a lead over, Mrs. Brunton."

"Do you know, Alie, I've sometimes thought that you and Hector don't get on very well together." Mollie, in dressing-gown and bedroom slippers, sat on the edge of her sister's bed. Margery Brunton, inclining to the aggressive about her forthcoming infant, departed early; and the two Fullerfords had been talking for nearly an hour, quite unsentimentally, about frocks, parents, books, a theater or so. "What makes you say that?" Aliette, shoulder-deep in bedclothes, looked up from her pillow. "Oh, I don't know." The girl blushed; and there fell a moment's awkward silence, during which it flashed through Aliette's sleepy mind that perhaps Hector had been confiding their matrimonial differences to his sister-in-law. But she dismissed the thought: Hector's reticence, even about small matters, was proverbial in the family. Besides, the reason for Mollie's question was sufficiently obvious. "We get on as well as most married people, I expect," protested Hector Brunton's wife. "I'm afraid I'm a terrible sentimentalist," went on Mollie. "Sometimes," she blushed again, "I think I'm even worse than that. I've never met a man I liked well enough to marry. Though, of course, I've let two or three men make love to me. It's rather nice to feel that a man's fond of you." She hesitated, and broke off--Aliette being hardly the kind of sister to whom one confided one's love-affairs. "Most women are awful rotters," said the girl, after a long pause. Aliette restrained the retort at her lips; and Mollie's naïve revelations continued. "Most men aren't. They've got a higher sense of honor than we have. I found that out while I was nursing. Reading the women's letters to fellows who'd been gas-blinded. There was one, I remember, who wanted a divorce. She wrote: 'I'm afraid I haven't been playing the game while you've been away.' And she didn't seem 

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