"Well, I guess this is all right," he said, and she answered briefly: "Don't forget you're to take down Madame de Follerive; and for goodness'

sake don't call her 'Countess.'"

"Why, she is one, ain't she?" he returned good-humouredly.

"I wish you'd put that newspaper away," she continued; his habit of leaving old newspapers about the drawing-room annoyed her.

"Oh, that reminds me--" instead of obeying her he unfolded the paper.

"I brought it in to show you something. Jim Driscoll's been appointed Amba.s.sador to England."

"Jim Driscoll--!" She caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll--that pitiful nonent.i.ty, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to--all the banquets and ceremonies and precedences....

"I shouldn't say she'd want to, with so few jewels--" She dropped the paper and turned to her husband. "If you had a spark of ambition, that's the kind of thing you'd try for. You could have got it just as easily as not!"

He laughed and thrust his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes with the gesture she disliked. "As it happens, it's about the one thing I couldn't."

"You couldn't? Why not?"

"Because you're divorced. They won't have divorced Amba.s.sadresses."

"They won't? Why not, I'd like to know?"

"Well, I guess the court ladies are afraid there'd be too many pretty women in the Emba.s.sies," he answered jocularly.

She burst into an angry laugh, and the blood flamed up into her face.

"I never heard of anything so insulting!" she cried, as if the rule had been invented to humiliate her.

There was a noise of motors backing and advancing in the court, and she heard the first voices on the stairs. She turned to give herself a last look in the gla.s.s, saw the blaze of her rubies, the glitter of her hair, and remembered the brilliant names on her list.

But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Amba.s.sador's wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for.

THE END