"Fancy!" she exclaimed a moment later, sitting up straight. "He's been sentenced to fifteen years' imprisonment."

"Your David?" asked the d.u.c.h.ess indifferently.

"Certainly not. He's poor but honest. J. Sprague Ramsay, of Chicago, the multimillionaire banker, whose wife and daughter I knew in India. I don't in the least understand it--it's for lending himself money from his own banks or something. It's too bad. Poor, poor Sibylla. And Jane was just coming to a marriageable age. It will spoil all her chances."

"It should be a lesson to you, Nina. I should think you'd feel disgraced. You a.s.sociated with the family of a convict. You must curb your indiscriminate freedom. You must, really."

"Pooh!" cried her great-niece. "The Ramsays were charming. It wasn't their fault that J. Sprague borrowed more than he had a right to."

Her great-aunt's disapproval of Americans in general and of the American aviator in particular, had the usual effect of disapproval when brought to bear on an independent spirit. It whetted Nina's ardor for the daring and intrepid David Pierson.

She not only attended the meetings at which he flew, but on repeated occasions she flew with him. Her infatuation was the talk of her friends and her enemies.

As a matter of fact the American was by no means a bad sort. He came of good, honest stock, was fairly well educated, and possessed a comfortable income from Kentucky tobacco plantations, which he had inherited.

With the coming of autumn, however, the inevitable happened. He proposed marriage to the young widow who had led him to believe he had only to ask to be given. And Nina refused him flatly.

David Pierson, however, was a distinctly different type from young Andrews. His eyes didn't grow misty and he didn't weep. He was, in fact, a distinctly different type from any of the men she had jilted or repulsed. He didn't storm and he didn't sulk.

On the contrary, he caught hold of her shoulders and he shook her until her teeth chattered. And then, not in the least gently, he boxed both her ears, and walked out, leaving her in a towering rage.

Out of sheer revenge, rather than for any other reason, she began almost at once to encourage the attentions of a certain cabinet minister. She let him hold her hand and send her books of amorous verses with marked stanzas.

More than that, she invited veiled paragraphs in the society journals, hinting at a pending betrothal, and mailed each issue, blue-penciled, to the aviator's home address in Louisville.

But with the cabinet minister Nina Darling went no further than she had with any of the others. She shunted him by making him madly jealous, first, and then openly casting him aside for one of the poets to whose pa.s.sionate lines he had been the means of introducing her.

In the next three years she ran sort of continuously amuck against the susceptible, strewing her world with broken, bleeding hearts. And all the while the one man for whom she would gladly have given her life looked on with a sneer and a cynic smile, and said harsh, cruel things to her and of her, in season and out.

There were those who held that it was due in a large measure to Lord Kneedrock that the ugly mystery of poor Darling's horrid death was not permitted to rest in the grave with the victim.

Still there may have been injustice in this, for there were still quite as many to say that Kneedrock shot him because he coveted Nina for himself, as there were that it was Nina or that it was suicide.

Wherever two or three were gathered together in Vanity Fair, one was sure to hear the phrase: "Poor Darling!" and without waiting very long for it, either.

Someone said "Poor Darling!" at Bellingdown, one day in late March, and as usual the Umballa tragedy was threshed out all over again, though it was nearly five years gone, and to separate a fresh grain of truth from the chaff was nigh hopeless.

"Oh, Nina couldn't," Lady Bellingdown insisted. "I've seen a lot of her, and I could tell."

Lord Waltheof, who was the "tame cat" of the household, a tall, slim, dark man, reminded her that Mrs. Darling couldn't remember what happened.

"Oh, you're wrong about that, Wally," put in Charlotte Grey, the fair, thin bride of Sir George, who was up in town with Lord Bellingdown.

"You're wrong about that. She didn't remember at first, but she does now. Nibbetts told me so. She remembers, but she doesn't speak of it.

That is rather suspicious, you know."

"She's a widow without a sorrow," Kitty Bellingdown declared. "She never loved Darling; we all know that."

"She doesn't know what love is," a.s.serted the bride, who was missing her husband terribly. "She has pa.s.sion, but no affection."

"Has she been casting sheeps' eyes at Shucks?" It was Waltheof who asked. "Shucks" was Sir George's nursery name. It is a mark of the bluest blood to carry some such absurd nursery cognomen from the nursery to Eton, or Harrow, or Winchester, and then on to one or the other of the universities.

"She'd better not," Charlotte returned, her eyes snapping.

"I--I didn't know." And Waltheof slyly pinched Lady Bellingdown's shoulder as he stood behind her chair.

"I've always thought Nibbetts had a hand in it," Lord Waltheof ventured.

"It was odd, his turning up just at that time, you must all admit that.

Eight years he buried himself, G.o.d only knows where, and then all of a sudden he appears in Umballa, and the very next night poor Darling is mysteriously shot. Then back he comes to London and takes up the old life, just as if he had never been away and nothing had happened."

Lady Kitty nodded. "That's perfectly true," she said. "Does any one know where he was?"

"Yes," the tall man answered. "We all know generally. But only one man accurately. His solicitor was informed all the while. When I want a secret kept that's the man I'm going to employ."

"I'd see him right away if I were you," suggested Charlotte, and Lady Bellingdown frowned.

"I believe Nibbetts would marry Nina to-morrow if she'd say yes,"

Waltheof continued. "But she won't. She won't say yes to any man. Once was enough for her. That's flat."

"If he cares so much for her he has a poor way of showing it. I've never heard him give her a civil word." The bride spoke out of the richness of her experience.

"I'm certain she cares for him," averred Lady Bellingdown. "And he's a brute to her."

"It's the crime that stands between them," Waltheof said with decision.

"Nibbetts is queer. And it's that that's preyed on his mind until he's not quite all there, don't you know."

"Everybody knows his father is queer," contributed their hostess.

They dropped the subject after a while without getting a step further than when they started. But they didn't drop gossip. Dinghal, with his broken nose, would have been in his element at Bellingdown. But he was still in Umballa, suffering tortures from catarrh.

"Caryll Carleigh's to be married on the twelfth." Lady Kitty flung the announcement to Lady Charlotte.

"So soon?"

"Yes. They've hurried it, because the girl's mother, who is the most restless of mortals, wants to go to China or somewhere. She's just back now from Egypt. Her daughter was with friends at Capri for the winter.

That's where Caryll met her. They are Americans, you know."

"So I heard. I do hope Caryll will be happy; but it is a risk. Americans are always divorcing. They're so lacking in repose."

"He tells me she's adorable."

"Oh, of course. Still he might, don't you think, have done better at home? English girls fit in so much better."

"I dare say. But one never could advise Caryll. He's most exasperatingly headstrong." The young baronet was her nephew and she knew.

"I've met Mrs. Veynol and her filly," Waltheof put in. It was after dinner, and he had been sipping liqueurs and smoking cigarettes alone in the dining-hall. "She's exasperatingly headstrong, too. Not my choice for a mother-in-law."

Lady Bellingdown twisted her long neck to give him a smile. He was behind her chair as usual. "Caryll never met Mrs. Veynol until a week ago. It was all arranged by correspondence," she said.