He took her hand and led her back to the sofa. When she had sat down, he poured out tea, put in cream and gave it to her.

"Nothing to eat," she said.

He poured out his tea and sat down in a chair opposite to her, and close to her.

"May I dare to speak frankly?" he asked. "I've known you so long, and I've--I've loved you very much, and I still do."

"Go on!" she answered.

"You thought your beauty was everything, that so long as it lasted you were safe from unhappiness. Well, to-day you are beautiful, and yet--"

"But what does he care for?" she said. "What do men care for? You pretend that it's something romantic, something good even. Really, it's impudent--just that--cold and impudent. You're a fool, Robin, you're a fool!"

"Am I? Thank God there are men--and men. You can't be what Carey said."

For once he had spoken incautiously. He had blurted out something he never meant to say.

"Mr. Carey!" she exclaimed quickly, curiously. "What did Mr. Carey say I was?"

"Oh--"

"No, Robin, you are to tell me. No diplomatic lies."

A sudden, almost brutal desire came into him to tell her the truth, to revel in plain speaking for once, and to see how she would bear it.

"He said you were an egoist, that you were fine enough in your brilliant selfishness to stand quite alone--"

A faint smile moved the narrow corners of her lips at the last words. He went on.

"--That your ideal of a real man, the sort of man a woman loses her head for, was--"

He stopped. Carey's description of the Lord Holme and Leo Ulford type had not been very delicate.

"Was--?" she said, with insistence. "Was--?"

Robin thought how she had hurt him, and said:

"Carey said, a huge mass of bones, muscles, thews, sinews, that cares nothing for beauty."

"Beauty! That doesn't care for beauty! But then--?"

"Carey meant--yes, I'm sure Carey meant real beauty."

"What do you mean by 'real beauty'?"

"An inner light that radiates outward, but whose abiding-place is hidden--perhaps. But one can't say. One can only understand and love."

"Oh. And Mr. Carey said that. Was he--was he at all that evening as he was at Arkell House? Was he talking nonsense or was he serious?"

"Difficult to say! But he was not as he was at Arkell House. Which knows you best--Carey or I?"

"Neither of you. I don't know myself."

"What are you going to do?"

"I don't know. The only thing I know is that you can't tell me what to do."

"No, I can't."

"But perhaps I can tell you."

She put down her cup and looked at him with a sort of grave kindness that he had never seen in her face before.

"What to do?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

"Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn't there. Perhaps it doesn't exist. And if it does--perhaps it's a poor, feeble thing that's no good to me, no good to me."

Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on them and began to cry gently.

Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her in an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the window.

She was crying for Fritz.

That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from the heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her existence, showed that she could love.

CHAPTER XII

AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many people, accepting the American's cleverness as a fashionable fact, also accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious, and credited Lady Holme with a secret leading towards the improper never before suspected by them. They remembered the break between the Holmes and Carey, the strange scene at the Arkell House ball, and began to whisper many things of Lady Holme, and to turn a tide of pity and of sympathy upon her husband. On this tide Lord Holme and the American might be said to float merrily like corks, unabashed in the eye of the sun. Their intimacy was condoned on all sides as a natural result of Lady Holme's conduct. Most of that which had been accomplished by Lord and Lady Holme together after their reconciliation over the first breakfast was undone. The silent tongue began to wag, and to murmur the usual platitudes about the poor fellow who could not find sympathy at home and so was obliged, against his will, to seek for it outside.

All this Lady Holme had foreseen as she sat in her box at the British Theatre.

The wrong impression of her was enthroned. She had to reckon with it.

This fact, fully recognised by her, made her wish to walk warily where otherwise her temper might have led her to walk heedlessly. She wanted to do an unusual thing, to draw her husband's attention to an intimacy which was concealed from the world--the intimacy between herself and Leo Ulford.

After her visit to the house in Half Moon Street she began to see a great deal of Leo Ulford. Carey had been right when he said that they would get on together. She understood him easily and thoroughly, and for that very reason he was attracted by her. Men delight to feel that a woman is understanding them; women that no man can ever understand them.

Under the subtle influence of Lady Holme's complete comprehension of him, Leo Ulford's nature expanded, stretched itself as his long legs stretched themselves when his mind was purring. There was not much in him to reveal, but what there was he revealed, and Lady Holme seemed to be profoundly interested in the contents of his soul.

But she was not interested in the contents of his soul in public places on which the world's eye is fixed. She refused to allow Leo to do what he desired, and assumed an air of almost possessive friendship before Society. His natural inclination for the blatant was firmly checked by her. She cared nothing for him really, but her woman's instinct had divined that he was the type of man most likely to rouse the slumbering passion of Fritz, if Fritz were led to suspect that she was attracted to him. Men like Lord Holme are most easily jealous of the men who most closely resemble them. Their conceit leads them to put an exaggerated value upon their own qualities in others, upon the resemblance to their own physique exhibited by others.

Leo Ulford was rather like a younger and coarser Lord Holme. In him Lady Holme recognised an effective weapon for the chastisement, if not for the eventual reclamation, of her husband. It was characteristic of her that this was the weapon she chose, the weapon she still continued to rely on even after her conversation with Robin Pierce. Her faith in white angels was very small. Perpetual contact with the world of to-day, with life as lived by women of her order, had created within her far other faiths, faiths in false gods, a natural inclination to bow the knee in the house of Rimmon rather than before the altars guarded by the Eternities.

And then--she knew Lord Holme; knew what attracted him, what stirred him, what moved him to excitement, what was likely to hold him. She felt sure that he and such men as he yield the homage they would refuse to the angel to the siren. Instead of seeking the angel within herself, therefore, she sought the siren. Instead of striving to develope that part of her which was spiritual, she fixed all her attention upon that part of her which was fleshly, which was physical. She neglected the flame and began to make pretty patterns with the ashes.