He was looking for his hat, when again there was a commotion on the stairs—a high voice giving orders—and in burst Kitty. She stood still as soon as she saw her guests, talking so fast and pouring out such a flood of excuses that no one could get in a word. Then she flew to each guest in turn, taking them by both hands—Darrell only excepted—and showing herself so penitent, amusing, and charming that everybody was propitiated. It was Fanchette, of course—Fanchette the criminal, the incomparable. Her dress for the ball. Kitty raised eyes and hands to heaven—it would be a marvel, a miracle. Unless, indeed, she were lying cold and quiet in her little grave before the time came to wear it. But Fanchette's tempers—Fanchette's caprices—no! Kitty began to mimic the great dressmaker torn to pieces by the crowd of fashionable ladies, stopping abruptly in the middle to say to Cliffe:

"You were going away? I saw you take up your hat."

"I despaired of my hostess," said Cliffe, with a smile. Then as he perceived that Mrs. Alcot had taken up the theme and was holding the others in play, he added in a lower voice, "and I was in no mood for second-best."

Kitty's eyes twinkled a moment as she turned them on Madeleine Alcot.

"Ah, I remember—at Grosville Park—what a bad temper you had. You would have gone away furious."

"With disappointment—yes," said Cliffe, as he looked at her with an admiration he scarcely endeavored to conceal. Kitty was in black, but a large hat of white tulle, in the most extravagant fashion of the day, made a frame for her hair and eyes, and increased the general lightness and fantasy of her appearance. Cliffe tried to recall her as he had first seen her at Grosville Park, but his recollection of the young girl could not hold its own against the brilliant and emphatic reality before him.

At luncheon it chafed him that he must divide her with the Dean. Yet she was charming with the old man, who chatted history, art, and Paris to her, with a delightful innocence and ignorance of all that made Lady Kitty Ashe the talk of the town, and an old-fashioned deference besides, that insensibly curbed her manner and her phrases as she answered him. Yet when the Dean left her free she returned to Cliffe, as though in some sort they two had really been talking all the time, through all the apparent conversation with other people.

"I have read all your telegrams," she said. "Why did you attack William so fiercely?"

Cliffe was taken by surprise, but he felt no embarrassment—her tone was not that of the wife in arms.

"I attacked the official—not the man. William knows that."

"He is coming in to-day if possible. He wanted to see you."

"Good news! William knows that he would have hit just as hard in my place."

"I don't think he would," said Kitty, calmly. "He is so generous."

The color rushed to Cliffe's face.

"Well scored! I wish I had a wife to play these strokes for me. I shall argue that a keen politician has no right to be generous. He is at war."

Kitty took no notice. She leaned her little chin on her hand, and her eyes perused the face of her companion.

"Where have you been—all the time—before America?"

"In the deserts—fighting devils," said Cliffe, after a moment.

"What does that mean?" she asked, wondering.

"Read my new book. That will tell you about the deserts."

"And the devils?"

"Ah, I keep them to myself."

"Do you?" she said, softly. "I have just read your poems over again."

Cliffe gave a slight start, then looked indifferent.

"Have you? But they were written three years ago. Dieu merci, one finds new devils like new acquaintances."

She shook her head.

"What do you mean?" he asked her, half amused, half arrested.

"They are always the old," she said, in a low voice. Their eyes met. In hers was the same veiled, restless melancholy as in his own. Together with the dazzling air of youth that surrounded her, the cherished, flattered, luxurious existence that she and her house suggested, they made a strange impression upon him. "Does she mean me to understand that she is not happy?" he thought to himself. But the next moment she was engaged in a merry chatter with the Dean, and all trace of the mood she had thus momentarily shown him had vanished.

Half-way through the luncheon, Ashe came in. He appeared, fresh and smiling, irreproachably dressed, and showing no trace whatever of the hard morning of official work he had just passed through, nor of the many embarrassments which, as every one knew, were weighing on the Foreign Office. The Dean, with his keen sense for the dramatic, watched the meeting between him and Cliffe with some closeness, having in mind the almost personal duel between the two men—a duel of letters, telegrams, or speeches, which had been lately carried on in the sight of Europe and America. For Ashe now represented the Foreign Office in the House of Commons, and had been much badgered by the Tory extremists who followed Cliffe.

Naturally, being Englishmen, they met as though nothing had happened and they had parted the day before in Pall Mall. A "Hullo, Ashe!" and "Hullo, Cliffe! glad to see you back again," completed the matter. The Dean enjoyed it as a specimen of English "phlegm," recalling with amusement his last visit to the Paris of the Second Empire—Paris torn between government and opposition, the salons of the one divided from the salons of the other by a sulphurous gulf, unless when some Lazarus of the moment, some well-known novelist or poet, cradled in the Abraham's bosom of Liberalism, passed amid shrieks of triumph or howls of treason into the official inferno.

Not that there was any avoiding of topics in this English case. Ashe had no sooner slipped into his seat than he began to banter Cliffe upon a letter of a supporter which had appeared in that morning's Times. It was written by Lord S., who had played the part of public "fool" for half a generation. To be praised by him was disaster, and Cliffe's flush showed at once that the letter had caused him acute annoyance. He and Ashe fell upon the writer, vying with each other in anecdotes that left him presently close-plucked and bare.

"That's all very well," said Kitty, amid the laughter which greeted the last tale, "but he never told you how he proposed to the second Lady S."

And lifting a red strawberry, which she held poised against her red, laughing lips, she waited a moment—looking round her. "Go on, Kitty," said Ashe, approvingly; "go on."

Thus permitted, Kitty gave one of the little "scenes," arranged from some experience of her own, which were very famous among her intimates. Ashe called them her "parlor tricks," and was never tired of making her exhibit them. And now, just as at Grosville Park, she held her audience. She spoke without a halt, her small features answering perfectly to every impulse of her talent, each touch of character or dialogue as telling as a malicious sense of comedy could make it; arms, hands, shoulders all aiding in the final result—a table swept by a very storm of laughter, in the midst of which Kitty quietly finished her strawberry.

"Well done, Kitty!" Ashe, who sat opposite to her, stretched his hand across, and patted hers.

"Does she love him?" Cliffe asked himself, and could not make up his mind, closely as he tried to observe their relations. He was more and more conscious of the exciting effect she produced on himself, doubly so, indeed, because of that sudden stroke of melancholy wherewith—like a Rembrandt shadow, she had thrown into relief the gayety and frivolity of her ordinary mood.

The stimulus, whatever it was, played upon his vanity. He, too, sought an opening and found it. Soon it was he who was monopolizing the conversation with an account of two days spent with Bismarck in a Prussian country-house, during the triumphant days of the winter which followed on Sadowa. The story was brilliantly told, and of some political importance. But it was disfigured by arrogance and affectation, and Ashe's eyes began to dance a little. Cliffe meanwhile could not forget that he was in the presence of a rival and an official, could not refrain after a while from a note of challenge here and there. The conversation diverged from the tale into matters of current foreign politics. Ashe, lounging and smoking, at first knew nothing, had heard of nothing, as usual. Then a comment or correction dropped out; Cliffe repeated himself vehemently—only to provoke another. Presently, no one knew how, the two men were measured against each other corps à corps—the wide knowledge and trained experience of the minister against the originality, the force, the fantastic imagination of the writer.

The Dean watched it with delight. He was very fond of Ashe, and liked to see him getting the better of "the newspaper fellow." Kitty's lovely brown eyes travelled from one to the other. Now it seemed to the Dean that she was proud of Ashe, now that she sympathized with Cliffe. Soon, however, like the god at Philippi, she swept upon the poet and bore him from the field.

"Not a word more politics!" she said, peremptorily, to Ashe, holding up her hand. "I want to talk to Mr. Cliffe about the ball."

Cliffe was not very ready to obey. He had an angry sense of having been somehow shown to disadvantage, and would like to have challenged his host again. But Kitty poured balm into his wounds. She drew him apart a little, using the play of her beautiful eyes for him only, and talking to him in a new voice of deference.

"You're going, of course? Lady M. told me the other day she must have you."

Cliffe, still a little morose, replied that his invitation had been waiting for him at his London rooms. He gave the information carelessly, as though it did not matter to him a straw. In reality, as soon as, while still in America, he had seen the announcement of the ball in one of the New York papers, he had written at once to the Marchioness who was to give it—an old acquaintance of his—practically demanding an invitation. It had been sent indeed with alacrity, and without waiting for its arrival Cliffe had ordered his dress in Paris. Kitty inquired what it was to be.

"I told my man to copy a portrait of Alva."

"Ah, that's right," said Kitty, nodding—"that's right. Only it would have been better if it had been Torquemada."

Rather nettled, Cliffe asked what there might be about him that so forcibly suggested the Grand Inquisitor. Kitty, cigarette in hand, with half-shut eyes, did not answer immediately. She seemed to be perusing his face with difficulty.

"Strength, I suppose," she said at last, slowly. Cliffe waited, then burst into a laugh.

"And cruelty?" She nodded.

"Who are my victims?"

She said nothing.

"Whose tales have you been listening to, Lady Kitty?"

She mentioned the name of a French lady. Cliffe changed countenance.

"Ah, well, if you have been talking to her," he said, haughtily, "you may well expect to see me appear as Diabolus in person."

"No. But it's since then that I've read the poems again. You see, you tell the public so much—"

"That you think you have the right to guess the rest?" He paused, then added, with impatience, "Don't guess, Lady Kitty. You have everything that life can give you. Let my secrets alone."

There was silence. Kitty looking round her saw that Madeleine Alcot was entertaining her other guests, and that she and Cliffe were unobserved. Suddenly Cliffe bent towards her, and said, with roughness, his face struggling to conceal the feeling behind it:

"You heard—and you believed—that I tormented her—that I killed her?"

The anguish in his eyes seemed to strike a certain answering fire from Kitty's.

"Yes, but—"

"But what?"

"I didn't think it very strange—"

Cliffe watched her closely.

"—that a man should be—an inhuman beast—if he were jealous—and desperate. You can sympathize with these things?"

She drew a long breath, and threw away the cigarette she had been holding suspended in her small fingers.

"I don't know anything about them."

"Because," he hesitated, "your own life has been so happy?"

She evaded him. "Don't you think that jealousy will soon be as dead as—saying your prayers and going to church? I never meet anybody that cares enough—to be jealous."

She spoke first with passionate force, then with contempt, glancing across the room at Madeleine Alcot. Cliffe saw the look, and remembered that Mrs. Alcot's husband, a distinguished treasury official, had been for years the intimate friend of a very noble and beautiful woman, herself unhappily married. There was no scandal in the matter, though much talk. Mrs. Alcot meanwhile had her own affairs; her husband and she were apparently on friendly terms; only neither ever spoke of the other; and their relations remained a mystery.

Cliffe bent over to Kitty.

"And yet you said you could understand?—such things didn't seem strange to you."

She gave a little, reckless laugh.

"Did I? It's like the people who think they could act or sing, if they only had the chance. I choose to think I could feel. And of course I couldn't. We've lost the power. All the old, horrible, splendid things are dead and done with."

"The old passions, you mean?"

"And the old poems! You'll never write like that again."

"God forbid!" said Cliffe, under his breath. Then as Kitty rose he followed her with his eyes. "Lady Kitty, you've thrown me a challenge that you hardly understand. Some day I must answer it."

"Don't answer it," said Kitty, hastily.

"Yes, if I can drag the words out," he said, sombrely. She met his look in a kind of fascination, excited by the memory of the story which had been told her, by her own audacity in speaking of it, by the presence of the dead passion she divined lying shrouded and ghastly in the mind of the man beside her. Even the ugly things of which he was accused did but add to the interest of his personality for a nature like hers, greedy of experience, and discontented with the real.

While he on his side was nattered and astonished by her attitude towards him, as Ashe's wife, she would surely dislike and try to trample on him. That was what he had expected.

"I hear you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty," said the Dean, who, having obstinately outstayed all the other guests, had now settled his small person and his thin legs into a chair beside his hostess with a view to five agreeable minutes. He was the most harmless of social epicures, was the Dean, and he felt that Lady Kitty had defrauded him at lunch in favor of that great, ruffling, Byronic fellow Cliffe, who ought to have better taste than to come lunching with the Ashes.

"Am I?" said Kitty, who had thrown herself into the corner of a sofa, and sat curled up there in an attitude which the Dean thought charming, though it would not, he was aware, "have become Mrs. Winston.

"Well, you know best," said the Dean. "But, at any rate, be good and explain to me what is an Archangel."

"Somebody whom most men and all women dislike," said Kitty, promptly.

"Yet they seem to be numerous," remarked the Dean.

"Not at all!" cried Kitty, with an air of offence; "not at all! If they were numerous they would, of course, be popular."

"And in fact they are rare—and detested? What other characteristics have they?"

"Courage," said Kitty, looking up.

"Courage to break rules? I hear they all call one another by their Christian names, and live in one another's rooms, and borrow one another's money, and despise conventionalities. I am sorry you are an Archangel, Lady Kitty."

"I didn't admit that I was," said Kitty, "but if I am, why are you sorry?"

"Because," said the Dean, smiling, "I thought you were too clever to despise conventionalities."

Kitty sat up with revived energy, and joined battle. She flew into a tirade as to the dulness and routine of English life, the stupidity of good people, and the tyranny of English hypocrisy. The Dean listened with amusement, then with a shade of something else. At last he got up to go.

"Well, you know, we have heard all that before. My point of view is so much more interesting—subtle—romantic! Anybody can attack Mrs. Grundy, but only a person of originality can adore her. Try it, Lady Kitty. It would be really worth your while."

Kitty mocked and exclaimed.

"Do you know what that phrase—that name of abomination—always recalls to me?" pursued the old man.

"It bores me, even to guess," was Kitty's petulant reply.

"Does it? I think of some of the noblest people I have ever known—brave men—beautiful women—who fought Mrs. Grundy, and perished."

The Dean stood looking down upon her, with an eager, sensitive expression. Tales that he had heeded very little when he had first heard them ran through his mind; he had thought Lady Kitty's intimate tête-à-tête with her husband's assailant in the press disagreeable and unseemly; and as for Mrs. Alcot, he had disliked her particularly.

Kitty looked up unquelled.

she quoted, with one of her most radiant and provoking smiles.

"Incorrigible!" cried the Dean, catching up his hat. "I see! Once an Archangel—always an Archangel."

"Oh no!" said Kitty. "There may be 'war in heaven.'"

"Well, don't take Mrs. Alcot for a leader, that's all," said the Dean, as he held out a hand of farewell.

"And now I understand!" cried Kitty, triumphantly. "You detest my best friend."

The Dean laughed, protested, and went. Ashe, who had been writing letters while Kitty and the Dean were talking, escorted the old man to the door.

When he returned he found Kitty sitting with her hands in her lap, lost apparently in thought.

"Darling," he said, looking at his watch, "I must be off directly, but I should like to see the boy."

Kitty started. She rang, and the child was brought down. He sat on Kitty's knee, and Ashe coming to the sofa, threw an arm round them both.

"You are not a bad-looking pair," he said, kissing first Kitty and then the baby. "But he's rather pale, Kitty. I think he wants the country."

Kitty said nothing, but she lifted the little white embroidered frock and looked at the twisted foot. Then Ashe felt her shudder.

"Dear, don't be morbid!" he cried, resentfully. "He will have so much brains that nobody will remember that. Think of Byron."

Kitty did not seem to have heard.

"I remember so well when I first saw his foot—after your mother told me—and they brought him to me," she said, slowly. "It seemed to me it was the end—"

"The end of what?"

"Of my dream."

"What do you mean, Kitty!"

"Do you remember the mask in the 'Tempest'? First Iris, with saffron wings, and rich Ceres, and great Juno—"

She half closed her eyes.

"Then the nymphs and the reapers—dancing together on 'the short-grassed green,' the sweetest, gayest show—"

She breathed the words out softly. "Then, suddenly—"

She sat up stiffly and struck her small hands together:

"Prospero starts and speaks. And in a moment—without warning—with 'a strange, hollow, and confused noise'"—she dragged the words drearily—"they heavily vanish. That"—she pointed, shuddering, to the child's foot—"was for me the sign of Prospero."

Ashe looked at her with anxiety, finding it indeed impossible to laugh at her.

She was very pale, her breath came with difficulty, and she trembled from head to foot. He tried to draw her into his arms, but she held him away.

"That first year I had been so happy," she continued, in the same voice. "Everything was so perfect, so glorious. Life was like a great pageant, in a palace. All the old terrors went. I often had fears as a child—fears I couldn't put into words, but that overshadowed me. Then when I saw Alice—the shadow came nearer. But that was all gone. I thought God was reconciled to me, and would always be kind to me now. And then I saw that foot, and I knew that He hated me still. He had burned His mark into my baby's flesh. And I was never to be quite happy again, but always in fear, fear of pain—and death—and grief—"

She paused. Her large eyes gazed into vacancy, and her whole slight frame showed the working of some mysterious and pitiful distress.

A wave of poignant alarm swept through Ashe's mind, coupled also with a curious sense of something foreseen. He had never witnessed precisely this mood in her before; but now that it was thus revealed, he was suddenly aware "that something like it had been for long moving obscurely below the surface of her life. He took the child and laid him on the floor, where he rolled at ease, cooing to himself. Then he came back to Kitty, and soothed her with extraordinary tenderness and skill. Presently she looked at him, as though some obscure trouble of which she had been the victim had released her, and she were herself again.

"Don't go away just yet," she said, in a voice which was still low and shaken. He came close to her, again put his arms round her, and held her on his breast in silence.

"That is heavenly!" he heard her say to herself after a while, in a whisper.

"Kitty!" His eyes grew dim and he stooped to kiss her.

"Heavenly—" she went on, still as though following out her own thought rather than speaking to him, "because one yields—yields! Life is such tension—always."

She closed her eyes quickly, and he watched the beautiful lashes lying still upon her cheek. With an emotion he could not explain—for it was not an emotion of the senses, just as her yielding had not been a yielding of the senses but a yielding of the soul—he continued to hold her in his arms, her life, her will given to him wholly, sighed out upon his heart.

Then gradually she recovered her balance; the normal Kitty came back. She put out her hand and touched his face.

"You must go back to the House, William."

"Yes, if you are all right."

She sat up, and began to rearrange some of her hair that had slipped down.

"You have carried us both into such heights and depths, darling!" said Ashe, after he had watched her a little in silence, "that I have forgotten to tell you the gossip I brought back from mother this morning."

Kitty paused, interrogatively. She was still pale.

"Do you know that mother is convinced Mary Lyster has made up her mind to marry Cliffe?"

There was a pause, then Kitty said, with incredulous contempt: "He would never dream of marrying her!"

"Not so sure! She has a great deal of money, and Cliffe wants money badly."

Ashe began to put his papers together. Kitty questioned him a little more, intermittently, as to what his mother had said. When he had left her, she sat for long on the sofa, playing with some flowers she had taken from her dress, or sombrely watching the child, as it lay on the floor beside her.

X

THE FINISHING TOUCHES

"Well, upon my word, Kitty!" said a voice from her husband's dressing-room.

Kitty turned impetuously.

"Do you like it?" she cried. Ashe approached. She lifted her horn to her mouth and stood tiptoe. The movement was enchanting; it had in it the youth and freshness of spring woods; it suggested mountain distances and the solitudes of high valleys. Intoxication spoke in Ashe's pulses; he wished the maids had been far away that he might have taken the goddess in his very human arms. Instead of which he stood lazily smiling.

"What Endymion are you calling?" he asked her. "Kitty, you are a dream!"

Kitty pirouetted, then suddenly stopped short and held out a foot.

"Look at those silk things, sir. Nobody but Fanchette could have made them look anything but a botch. But they spoil the dress. And all to please mother and Mrs. Grundy!"

"I like them. I suppose—the nearest you could get to buskins? You would have preferred ankles au naturel? I don't think you'd have been admitted, Kitty."

"Shouldn't I? And so few people have feet they can show!" sighed Kitty, regretfully.

Ashe's eyes met those of the maid, who was trying to hide her smiles, and he and she both laughed.

"What do you think about it, eh, Blanche?"

"I think her ladyship is much better as she is," said the maid, decidedly. "She'd have felt very strange when she got there."

Kitty turned upon her like a whirlwind. "Go to bed!" she said, putting both hands on the shoulders of the maid. "Go to bed at once! Esther can give me my cloak. Do you know, William, she was awake all last night thinking of her brother?"

"The brother who has had an operation? But I thought there was good news?" said Ashe, kindly.

"He's much better," put in Kitty. "She heard this afternoon. She won't be such a goose as to lie awake, I Should hope, to-night. Don't let me catch you here when I get back!" she said, releasing the girl, whose eyes had filled with tears. "Mr. Ashe will help me, and if he pulls the strings into knots, I shall just cut them—so there! Go away, get your supper, and go to bed. Such a life as I've led them all to-day!" She threw up her hands in a perfunctory penitence.

The maid was forced to go, and the housemaid also returned to the hall with Kitty's Opera-cloak and fan, till it should please her mistress to descend. Both of them were dead tired, but they took a genuine disinterested pleasure in Kitty's beauty and her fine frocks. She was not by any means always considerate of them; but still, with that wonderful generosity that the poor show every day to the rich, they liked her; and to Ashe every servant in the house was devoted.

Kitty meanwhile had driven Ashe to his own toilette, and was walking about the room, now studying herself in the glass, and now chattering to him through the open door.

"Have you heard anything more about Tuesday?" she asked him, presently.

"Oh yes!—compliments by the dozen. Old Parham overtook me as I was walking away from the House, and said all manner of civil things."

"And I met Lady Parham in Marshall's," said Kitty. "She does thank so badly! I should like to show her how to do it. Dear me!" Kitty sighed. "Am I henceforth to live and die on Lady Parham's ample breast?"

She sat with one foot beating the floor, deep in meditation.

"And shall I tell you what mother said?" shouted Ashe through the door.

"Yes."

He repeated—so far as dressing would let him a number of the charming and considered phrases in which Lady Tranmore, full of relief, pleasure, and a secret self-reproach, had expressed to him the effect produced upon herself and a select public by Kitty's performance at the Parhams'. Kitty had indeed behaved like an angel—an angel en toilette de bal, reciting a scene from Alfred de Musset. Such politeness to Lady Parham, such smiles, sometimes a shade malicious, for the Prime Minister, who on his side did his best to efface all memory of his speech of the week before from the mind of his fascinating guest; smiles from the Princess, applause from the audience; an evening, in fact, all froth and sweetstuff, from which Lady Parham emerged grimly content, conscious at the same time that she was henceforward very decidedly, and rather disagreeably, in the Ashes' debt; while Elizabeth Tranmore went home in a tremor of delight, happily persuaded that Ashe's path was now clear.

Kitty listened, sometimes pleased, sometimes inclined to be critical or scornful of her mother-in-law's praise. But she did love Lady Tranmore, and on the whole she smiled. Smiles, indeed, had been Kitty's portion since that evening of strange emotion, when she had found herself sobbing in William's arms for reasons quite beyond her own defining. It was as if, like the prince in the fairy tale, some iron band round her heart had given way. She seemed to dance through the house; she devoured her child with kisses; and she was even willing sometimes to let William tell her what his mother suspected of the progress of Mary's affair with Geoffrey Cliffe, though she carefully avoided speaking directly to Lady Tranmore about it. As to Cliffe himself, she seemed to have dropped him out of her thoughts. She never mentioned him, and Ashe could only suppose she had found him disenchanting.

"Well, darling! I hope I have made a sufficient fool of myself to please you!"

Ashe had thrown the door wide, and stood on the threshold, arrayed in the brocade and fur of a Venetian noble. He was a somewhat magnificent apparition, and Kitty, who had coaxed or driven him into the dress, gave a scream of delight. She saw him before her own glass, and the crimson senator made eyes at the white goddess as they posed triumphantly together.

"You're a very rococo sort of goddess, you know, Kitty!" said Ashe. "Not much Greek about you!"

"Quite as much as I want, thank you," said Kitty, courtesying to her own reflection in the glass. "Fanchette could have taught them a thing or two! Now come along! Ah! Wait!"

And, gathering up her possessions, she left the room. Ashe, following her, saw that she was going to the nursery, a large room on the back staircase. At the threshold she turned back and put her finger to her lip. Then she slipped in, reappearing a moment afterwards to say, in a whisper, "Nurse is not in bed. You may come in." Nurse, indeed, knew much better than to be in bed. She had been sitting up to see her ladyship's splendors, and she rose smiling as Ashe entered the room.

"A parcel of idiots, nurse, aren't we?" he said, as he, too, displayed himself, and then he followed Kitty to the child's bedside. She bent over the baby, removed a corner of the cot-blanket that might tease his cheek, touched the mottled hand softly, removed a light that seemed to her too near—and still stood looking.

"We must go, Kitty."

"I wish he were a little older," she said, discontentedly, under her breath, "that he might wake up and see us both! I should like him to remember me like this."

"Queen and huntress, come away!" said Ashe, drawing her by the hand.

Outside the landing was dimly lighted. The servants were all waiting in the hall below.

"Kitty," said Ashe, passionately, "give me one kiss. You're so sweet to-night—so sweet!"

She turned.

"Take care of my dress!" she smiled, and then she held out her face under its sparkling crescent, held it with a dainty deliberation, and let her lips cling to his.

Ashe and Kitty were soon wedged into one of the interminable lines of carriages that blocked all the approaches to St. James's Square. The ball had been long expected, and there was a crowd in the streets, kept back by the police. The brougham went at a foot's pace, and there was ample time either for reverie or conversation. Kitty looked out incessantly, exclaiming when she caught sight of a costume or an acquaintance. Ashe had time to think over the latest phase of the negotiations with America, and to go over in his mind the sentences of a letter he had addressed to the Times in answer to one of great violence from Geoffrey Cliffe. His own letter had appeared that morning. Ashe was proud of it. He made bold to think that it exposed Cliffe's exaggerations and insincerities neatly, and perhaps decisively. At any rate, he hummed a cheerful tune as he thought of it.

Then suddenly and incongruously a recollection occurred to him.

"Kitty, do you know that I had a letter from your mother, this morning?"

"Had you?" said Kitty, turning to him with reluctance. "I suppose she wanted some money."

"She did. She says she is very hard up. If I cared to use it, I have an easy reply."

"What do you mean?"

"I might say,' D—-n it, we are, too!'"

Kitty laughed uneasily.

"Don't begin to talk money matters now, William, please."

"No, dear, I won't. But we shall really have to draw in."

"You will pay so many debts!" said Kitty, frowning.

Ashe went into a fit of laughter.

"That's my extravagance, isn't it? I assure you I go on the most approved principles. I divide our available money among the greatest number of hungry claimants it will stretch to. But, after all, it goes a beggarly short way."

"I know mother will think my diamond crescent a horrible extravagance," said Kitty, pouting. "But you are the only son, William, and we must behave like other people."

"Dear, don't trouble your little head," he said; "I'll manage it, somehow."

Indeed, he knew very well that he could never bring his own indolent and easy-going temper in such matters to face any real struggle with Kitty over money. He must go to his mother, who now—his father being a hopeless invalid—managed the estates with his own and the agent's help. It was, of course, right that she should preach to Kitty a little; but she would be sensible and help them out. After all, there was plenty of money. Why shouldn't Kitty spend it?

Any one who knew him well might have observed a curious contrast between his private laxity in these matters and the strictness of his public practice. He was scruple and delicacy itself in all financial matters that touched his public life—directorships, investments, and the like, no less than in all that concerned interest and patronage. He would have been a bold man who had dared to propose to William Ashe any expedient whatever by which his public place might serve his private gain. His proud and fastidious integrity, indeed, was one of the sources of his growing power. But as to private debts—and the tradesmen to whom they were owed—his standards were still essentially those of the Whigs from whom he descended, of Fox, the all-indebted, or of Melbourne, who has left an amusing disquisition on the art of dividing a few loaves and fishes in the shape of bank-notes among a multitude of creditors.

Not that affairs were as yet very bad. Far from it. But there was little to spare for Madame d'Estrées, who ought, indeed, to want nothing; and Ashe was vaguely meditating his reply to that lady when a face in a carriage near them, which was trying to enter the line, caught his attention.

"Mary!" he said, "à la Sir Joshua—and mother. They don't see us. Query, will Cliffe take the leap to-night? Mother reports a decided increase of ardor on his part. Sorry you don't approve of it, darling!"

"It's just like lighting a lamp to put it out—that's all!" said Kitty, with vivacity. "The man who marries Mary is done for."

"Not at all. Mary's money will give him the pedestal he wants, and trust Cliffe to take care of his own individuality afterwards! Now, if you'll transfer your alarms to Mary, I'm with you!"

"Oh! of course he'll be unkind to her. She may lay her account for that. But it's the marrying her!" And Kitty's upper-lip curled under a slow disdain.

William laughed out.

"Kitty, really!—you remind me, please, of Miss Jane Taylor:

"'I did not think there could be found—a little heart so hard!'

Mary is thirty; she would like to be married. And why not? She'll give quite as good as she gets."

"Well, she won't get—anything. Geoffrey Cliffe thinks of no one but himself."

Ashe's eyebrows went up.

"Oh, well, all men are selfish—and the women don't mind."

"It depends on how it's done," said Kitty.

Ashe declared that Cliffe was just an ordinary person, "l'homme sensuel moyen"—with a touch of genius. Except for that, no better and no worse than other people. What then?—the world was not made up of persons of enormous virtue like Lord Althorp and Mr. Gladstone. If Mary wanted him for a husband, and could capture him, both, in his opinion, would have pretty nearly got their deserts.

Kitty, however, fell into a reverie, after which she let him see a face of the same startling sweetness as she had several times shown him of late.

"Do you want me to be nice to her?" She nestled up to him.

"Bind her to your chariot wheels, madam! You can!" said Ashe, slipping a hand round hers.

Kitty pondered.

"Well, then, I won't tell her that I know he's still in love with the Frenchwoman. But it's on the tip of my tongue."

"Heavens!" cried Ashe. "The Vicomtesse D—-, the lady of the poems? But she's dead! I thought that was over long ago."

Kitty was silent for a moment, then said, with low-voiced emphasis:

"That any one could write those poems, and then think of Mary!"

"Yes, the poems were fine," said Ashe, "but make-believe!"

Kitty protested indignantly. Ashe bantered her a little on being one of the women who were the making of Cliffe.

"Say what you like!" she said, drawing a quick breath. "But, often and often, he says divine things—divinely! I feel them there!" And she lifted both hands to her breast with an impulsive gesture.

"Goddess!" said Ashe, kissing her hand because enthusiasm became her so well. "And to think that I should have dared to roast the divine one in a Times letter this morning!"

The hall and staircase of Yorkshire House were already filled with a motley and magnificent crowd when Ashe and Kitty arrived. Kitty, still shrouded in her cloak, pushed her way through, exchanging greetings with friends, shrieking a little now and then for the safety of her bow and quiver, her face flushed with pleasure and excitement. Then she disappeared into the cloak-room, and Ashe was left to wonder how he was going to endure his robes through the heat of the evening, and to exchange a laughing remark or two with the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, into whose company he had fallen.

"What are we doing it for?" he asked the young man, whose thin person was well set off by a Tudor dress.

"Oh, don't be superior!" said the other. "I'm going to enjoy myself like a school-boy!"

And that, indeed, seemed to be the attitude of most of the people present. And not only of the younger members of the dazzling company. What struck Ashe particularly, as he mingled with the crowd, was the alacrity of the elder men. Here was a famous lawyer already nearing the seventies, in the Lord Chancellor's garb of a great ancestor; here an ex-Viceroy of Ireland with a son in the government, magnificent in an Elizabethan dress, his fair bushy hair and reddish beard shining above a doublet on which glittered a jewel given to the founder of his house by Elizabeth's own hand; next to him, a white-haired judge in the robes of Judge Gascoyne; a peer, no younger, at his side, in the red and blue of Mazarin: and showing each and all in their gay complacent looks a clear revival of that former masculine delight in splendid clothes which came so strangely to an end with that older world on the ruins of which Napoleon rose. So with the elder women. For this night they were young again. They had been free to choose from all the ages a dress that suited them; and the result of this renewal of a long-relinquished eagerness had been in many cases to call back a bygone self, and the tones and gestures of those years when beauty is its own chief care.

As for the young men, the young women, and the girls, the zest and pleasure of the show shone in their eyes and movements, and spread through the hall and up the crowded staircase, like a warm, contagious atmosphere. At all times, indeed, and in all countries, an aristocracy has been capable of this sheer delight in its own splendor, wealth, good looks, and accumulated treasure; whether in the Venice that Petrarch visited; or in the Rome of the Renaissance popes; in the Versailles of the Grand Monarque; or in the Florence of to-day, which still at moments of festa reproduces in its midst all the costumes of the Cinque-cento.

In this English case there was less dignity than there would have been in a Latin country, and more personal beauty; less grace, perhaps, and yet a something richer and more romantic.

At the top of the stairs stood a marquis in a dress of the Italian Renaissance, a Gonzaga who had sat for Titian; beside him a fair-haired wife in the white satin and pearls of Henrietta Maria; while up the marble stairs, watched by a laughing multitude above, streamed Gainsborough girls and Reynolds women, women from the courts of Elizabeth, or Henri Quatre, of Maria Theresa, or Marie Antoinette, the figures of Holbein and Vandyck, Florentines of the Renaissance, the youths of Carpaccio, the beauties of Titian and Veronese.

"Kitty, make haste!" cried a voice in front, as Kitty began to mount the stairs. "Your quadrille is just called."

Kitty smiled and nodded, but did not hurry her pace by a second. The staircase was not so full as it had been, and she knew well as she mounted it, her slender figure drawn to its full height, her eyes flashing greeting and challenge to those in the gallery, the diamond genius on her spear glittering above her, that she held the stage, and that the play would not begin without her.

And indeed her dress, her brilliance, and her beauty let loose a hum of conversation—not always friendly.

"What is she?" "Oh, something mythological! She's in the next quadrille." "My dear, she's Diana! Look at her bow and quiver, and the moon in her hair." "Very incorrect!—she ought to have the towered crown!" "Absurd, such a little thing to attempt Diana! I'd back Actæon!"

The latter remark was spoken in the ear of Louis Harman, who stood in the gallery looking down. But Harman shook his head.

"You don't understand. She's not Greek, of course; but she's fairyland. A child of the Renaissance, dreaming in a wood, would have seen Artemis so—dressed up and glittering, and fantastic—as the Florentines saw Venus. Small, too, like the fairies!—slipping through the leaves; small hounds, with jewelled collars, following her!"

He smiled at his own fancy, still watching Kitty with his painter's eyes.

"She has seen a French print somewhere," said Cliffe, who stood close by. "More Versailles in it than fairyland, I think!"

"It is she that is fairyland," said Harman, still fascinated.

Cliffe's expression showed the sarcasm of his thought. Fairy, perhaps!—with the touch of malice and inhuman mischief that all tradition attributes to the little people. Why, after that first meeting, when the conversation of a few minutes had almost swept them into the deepest waters of intimacy, had she slighted him so, in other drawing-rooms and on other occasions? She had actually neglected and avoided him—after having dared to speak to him of his secret! And now Ashe's letter of the morning had kindled afresh his sense of rancor against a pair of people, too prosperous and too arrogant. The stroke in the Times had, he knew, gone home; his vanity writhed under it, and the wish to strike back tormented him, as he watched Ashe mounting behind his wife, so handsome, careless, and urbane, his jewelled cap dangling in his hand.

The quadrille of gods and goddesses was over. Kitty had been dancing with a fine clumsy Mars, in ordinary life an honest soldier and deer-stalker, the heir to a Scotch dukedom; having as her vis-à-vis Madeleine Alcot—as the Flora of Botticelli's "Spring"—and slim as Mercury in fantastic Renaissance armor. All the divinities of the Pantheon, indeed, were there, but in Gallicized or Italianate form; scarcely a touch of the true antique, save in the case of one beautiful girl who wore a Juno dress of white whereof the clinging folds had been arranged for her by a young Netherlands painter, Mr. Alma Tadema, then newly settled in this country. Kitty at first envied her; then decided that she herself could have made no effect in such a gown, and threw her the praises of indifference.

When, to Kitty's sharp regret, the music stopped and the glittering crew of immortals melted into the crowd, she found behind her a row of dancers waiting for the quadrille which was to follow. This was to consist entirely of English pictures revived—Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Romney—and to be danced by those for whose families they had been originally painted. As she drew back, looking eagerly to right and left, she came across Mary Lyster. Mary wore her hair high and powdered—a black silk scarf over white satin, and a blue sash.

"Awfully becoming!" said Kitty, nodding to her. "Who are you?"

"My great-great aunt!" said Mary, courtesying. "You, I see, go even farther back."

"Isn't it fun?" said Kitty, pausing beside her. "Have you seen William? Poor dear! he's so hot. How do you do?" This last careless greeting was addressed to Cliffe, whom she now perceived standing behind Mary.

Cliffe bowed stiffly.

"Excuse me. I did not see you. I was absorbed in your dress. You are Artemis, I see—with additions."

"Oh! I am an 'article de Paris,'" said Kitty. "But it seems odd that some people should take me for Joan of Arc." Then she turned to Mary. "I think your dress is quite lovely!" she said, in that warm, shy voice she rarely used except for a few intimates, and had never yet been known to waste on Mary. "Don't you admire it enormously, Mr. Cliffe?"

"Enormously," said Cliffe, pulling at his mustache. "But by now my compliments are stale."

"Is he cross about William's letter?" thought Kitty. "Well, let's leave them to themselves."

Then, as she passed him, something in the silent personality of the man arrested her. She could not forbear a look at him over her shoulder. "Are you—Oh! of course, I remember—" for she had recognized the dress and cap of the Spanish grandee.

Cliffe did not reply for a moment, but the harsh significance of his face revived in her the excitable interest she had felt in him on the day of his luncheon in Hill Street; an interest since effaced and dispersed, under the influence of that serenity and home peace which had shone upon her since that very day.

"I should apologize, no doubt, for not taking your advice," he said, looking her in the eyes. Their expression, half bitter, half insolent, reminded her.

"Did I give you any advice?" Kitty wrinkled up her white brows. "I don't recollect."

Mary looked at her sharply, suspiciously. Kitty, quite conscious of the look, was straightway pricked by an elfish curiosity. Could she carry him off—trouble Mary's possession there and then? She believed she could. She was well aware of a certain relation between herself and Cliffe, if, at least, she chose to develop it. Should she? Her vanity insisted that Mary could not prevent it.

However, she restrained herself and moved on. Presently looking back, she saw them still together, Cliffe leaning against the pedestal of a bust, Mary beside him. There was an animation in her eyes, a rose of pleasure on her cheek which stirred in Kitty a queer, sudden sympathy. "I am a little beast!" she said to herself. "Why shouldn't she be happy?"

Then, perceiving Lady Tranmore at the end of the ballroom, she made her way thither surrounded by a motley crowd of friends. She walked as though on air, "raining influence." And as Lady Tranmore caught the glitter of the diamond crescent, and beheld the small divinity beneath it, she, too, smiled with pleasure, like the other spectators on Kitty's march. The dress was monstrously costly. She knew that. But she forgot the inroad on William's pocket, and remembered only to be proud of William's wife. Since the Parhams' party, indeed, the unlooked-for submission of Kitty, and the clearing of William's prospects, Lady Tranmore had been sweetness itself to her daughter-in-law.

But her fine face and brow were none the less inclined to frown. She herself as Katharine of Aragon would have shed a dignity on any scene, but she was in no sympathy with what she beheld.

"We shall soon all of us be ashamed of this kind of thing," she declared to Kitty. "Just as people now are beginning to be ashamed of enormous houses and troops of servants."

"No, please! Only bored with them!" said Kitty. "There are so many other ways now of amusing yourself—that's all."

"Well, this way will die out," said Lady Tranmore. "The cost of it is too scandalous—people's consciences prick them."

Kitty vowed she did not believe there was a conscience in the room; and then, as the music struck up, she carried off her companion to some steps overlooking the great marble gallery, where they had a better view of the two lines of dancers.

It is said that as a nation the English have no gift for pageants. Yet every now and then—as no doubt in the Elizabethan mask—they show a strange felicity in the art. Certainly the dance that followed would have been difficult to surpass even in the ripe days and motherlands of pageantry. To the left, a long line, consisting mainly of young girls in their first bloom, dressed as Gainsborough and his great contemporaries delighted to paint these flowers of England—the folds of plain white muslin crossed over the young breast, a black velvet at the throat, a rose in the hair, the simple skirt showing the small pointed feet, and sometimes a broad sash defining the slender waist. Here were Stanleys, Howards, Percys, Villierses, Butlers, Osbornes—soft slips of girls bearing the names of England's rough and turbulent youth, bearing themselves to-night with a shy or laughing dignity, as though the touch of history and romance were on them. And facing them, the youths of the same families, no less handsome than their sisters and brides—in Romney's blue coats, or the splendid red of Reynolds and Gainsborough.

To and fro swayed the dancers, under the innumerable candles that filled the arched roof and upper walls of the ballroom; and each time the lines parted they disclosed at the farther end another pageant, to which that of the dance was in truth subordinate—a dais hung with blue and silver, and upon it a royal lady whose beauty, then in its first bloom, has been a national possession, since as, the "sea-king's daughter" she brought it in dowry to her adopted country. To-night she blazed in jewels as a Valois queen, with her court around her, and as the dancers receded, each youth and maiden seemed instinctively to turn towards her as roses to the sun.

"Oh, beautiful, beautiful world!" said Kitty to herself, in an ecstasy, pressing her small hands together; "how I love you!—love you!"

Meanwhile Darrell and Harman stood side by side near the doorway of the ballroom, looking in when the crowd allowed.

"A strange sight," said Harman. "Perhaps they take it too seriously."

"Ah! that is our English upper class," said Darrell, with a sneer. "Is there anything they take lightly?—par exemple! It seems to me they carry off this amusement better than most. They may be stupid, but they are good-looking. I say, Ashe"—he turned towards the new-comer who had just sauntered up to them—"on this exceptional occasion, is it allowed to congratulate you on Lady Kitty's gown?"

For Kitty, raised upon her step, was at the moment in full view.

Ashe made some slight reply, the slightest of which indeed annoyed the thin-skinned and morbid Darrell, always on the lookout for affronts. But Louis Harman, who happened to observe the Under-Secretary's glance at his wife, said to himself, "By George! that queer marriage is turning out well, after all."

The Tudor and Marie Antoinette quadrilles had been danced. There was a rumor of supper in the air.

"William!" said Kitty, in his ear, as she came across him in one of the drawing-rooms, "Lord Hubert takes me in to supper. Poor me!" She made an extravagant face of self-pity and swept on. Lord Hubert was one of the sons of the house, a stupid and inarticulate guardsman, Kitty's butt and detestation. Ashe smiled to himself over her fate, and went back to the ballroom in search of his own lady.

Meanwhile Kitty paused in the next drawing-room, and dismissed her following.

"I promised to wait here for Lord Hubert," she said. "You go on, or you'll get no tables."

And she waved them peremptorily away. The drawing-room, one of a suite which looked on the garden, thinned temporarily. In a happy fatigue, Kitty leaned dreamily over the ledge of one of the open windows, looking at the illuminated space below her. Amid the colored lights, figures of dream and fantasy walked up and down. In the midst flashed a flame-colored fountain. The sounds of a Strauss waltz floated in the air. And beyond the garden and its trees rose the dull roar of London.

A silk curtain floated out into the room under the westerly breeze, then, returning, sheathed Kitty in its folds. She stood there hidden, amusing herself like a child with the thought of startling that great heavy goose, Lord Hubert.

Suddenly a pair of voices that she knew caught her ear. Two persons, passing through, lingered, without perceiving her. Kitty, after a first movement of self-disclosure, caught her own name and stood motionless.

"Well, of course you've heard that we got through," said Lady Parham. "For once Lady Kitty behaved herself!"

"You were lucky!" said Mary Lyster. "Lady Tranmore was dreadfully anxious—"

"Lest she should cut us at the last?" cried Lady Parham. "Well, of course, Lady Kitty is 'capable de tout.'" She laughed. "But perhaps as you are a cousin I oughtn't to say these things."

"Oh, say what you like," said Mary. "I am no friend of Kitty's, and never pretended to be."

Lady Parham came closer, apparently, and said, confidentially: "What on earth made that man marry her? He might have married anybody. She had no money, and worse than no position."

"She worked upon his pity, of course, a good deal. I saw them in the early days at Grosville Park. She played her cards very cleverly. And then, it was just the right moment. Lady Tranmore had been urging him to marry."

"Well, of course," said Lady Parham, "there's no denying the beauty."

"You think so?" said Mary, as though in wonder. "Well, I never could see it. And now she has so much gone off."

"I don't agree with you. Many people think her the star to-night. Mr. Cliffe, I am told, admires her."

Kitty could not see how the eyes of the speaker, under a Sir Joshua turban, studied the countenance of Miss Lyster, as she threw out the words.

Mary laughed.

"Poor Kitty! She tried to flirt with him long ago—just after she arrived in London, fresh out of the convent. It was so funny! He told me afterwards he never was so embarrassed in his life—this baby making eyes at him! And now—oh no!"

"Why not now? Lady Kitty's very much the rage, and Mr. Cliffe likes notoriety."

"But a notoriety with—well, with some style, some distinction! Kitty's sort is so cheap and silly."

"Ah, well, she's not to be despised," said Lady Parham. "She's as clever as she can be. But her husband will have to keep her in order."

"Can he?" said Mary. "Won't she always be in his way?"

"Always, I should think. But he must have known what he was about. Why didn't his mother interfere? Such a family!—such a history!"

"She did interfere," said Mary. "We all did our best"—she dropped her voice—"I know I did. But it was no use. If men like spoiled children they must have them, I suppose. Let's hope he'll learn how to manage her. Shall we go on? I promised to meet my supper-partner in the library."

They moved away.

For some minutes Kitty stood looking out, motionless, but the beating of her heart choked her. Strange ancestral things—things of evil—things of passion—had suddenly awoke, as it were, from sleep in the depths of her being, and rushed upon the citadel of her life. A change had passed over her from head to foot. Her veins ran fire.

At that moment, turning round, she saw Geoffrey Cliffe enter the room in which she stood. With an impetuous movement she approached him.

"Take me down to supper, Mr. Cliffe. I can't wait for Lord Hubert any more, I'm so hungry!"

"Enchanted!" said Cliffe, the color leaping into his tanned face as he looked down upon the goddess. "But I came to find—"

"Miss Lyster? Oh, she is gone in with Mr. Darrell. Come with me. I have a ticket for the reserved tent. We shall have a delicious corner to ourselves."

And she took from her glove the little coveted paste-board, which—handed about in secret to a few intimates of the house—gave access to the sanctum sanctorum of the evening.

Cliffe wavered. Then his vanity succumbed. A few minutes later the supper guests in the tent of the élite saw the entrance of a darkly splendid Duke of Alva, with a little sandalled goddess. All compact, it seemed, of ivory and fire, on his arm.