“I tell you I won’t!”

“You prefer to skulk here?”

“If it hadn’t been for your unreasonable folly about that wretched footman——” he began.

“I’m not going to be seen with footmen that don’t match for you or anybody. You’ll be expecting me next to wear odd gloves or shoes or stockings.”

The Duke was relieved from trying for a reply to this unanswerable argument by a knock at the door.

“Mr. Playford is in the blue drawing-room, your Grace.”

The Duke glanced rather helplessly at his wife.

“Show Mr. Playford here,” she said to the man, with decision. “Now we shall hear something of what is being said in the world outside, which you haven’t the pluck to face. Aubrey Playford knows everything.”

Next moment the omniscient one was shaking hands with them, and wondering curiously what sort of a tête-á-tête he had interrupted. As the Duchess was so smiling[44] and the Duke so obviously relieved, he concluded that he had broken up a row.

[44]

“Isn’t it too disgustingly provoking, this fuss about that tiresome affair!” the Duchess said, as soon as they had settled down. “These wretched cheap papers.”

“Oh, they must have a sensation,” Playford answered, politely sympathetic. “One comfort is that nobody believes half they read in them.”

No one could be better aware than Aubrey Playford of the falseness of that statement. No one knew better than he, a keen observer of his kind, that people are only too greedy to take in everything, without discount, that can be said or printed to their neighbour’s obloquy, or disadvantage, and more particularly when that neighbour happens to hold a high position. Under some conditions Playford would have been spiteful enough to say so, and indulge in a half-hour of moral vivisection; but that was not his cue nor his purpose to-day.

“It is altogether most provoking,” the Duchess declared. “What are they saying about it, Aubrey? I don’t mean the wretched papers, but at the clubs?”

Playford gave a shrug. “What do they ever say at the clubs beyond what some one tells them to say?” he replied, with a cynical contempt that, coming to him so easily, 

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