"Come, Miss Delarayne, come!" he remonstrated. Then he added, after a pause, "But perhaps I am wrong in assuming that you should feel any confidence in me. After all, why should you?"

She had never yet been in the presence of a man who inspired such complete confidence, or who made her desire so ardently to be up and about, active and well in his presence. Nevertheless her indomitable pride made her moderate the manner of her reply.

"What can I say?" she exclaimed, pretending to be at the end of her resources.

He flicked an imaginary feather from his knee. "Shall I prompt you?" he enquired.

His coolness at once mastered and terrified her.

"How can you!" she ejaculated, her resistance failing.

"Why haven't you told me, for instance," he began, "that you have scarcely slept for five or six nights."

Her mouth fell. "Lord Henry!"

"Why haven't you said that last night, or perhaps for the last two nights, you have tried a certain narcotic without much success? Sleep is a very essential thing, Miss Delarayne. One cannot go without it with impunity. You probably realise that."

She stammered the beginning of a denial, but the words died on her lips.

She was too stiff with alarm to be able to speak. After all, vanity is a great power even in the noblest of us.

"Miss Delarayne," Lord Henry continued, "you and I can keep a secret. I can at any rate. Let me see whether I cannot tell you why you have tried to mislead me."

Her ears were hot, and she glanced involuntarily towards the garden door. Had any one else than Lord Henry revealed a fraction of his ability to pierce her secret she would have fled.

"A good suggestion," he exclaimed, following the direction of her eyes.

"Let's sit in the garden."

He opened the door, and she walked out in front of him,--stiff, proud, and erect. He noticed a shadow running back into the house, and presumed it was Mrs. Delarayne.

They reached the small marquee, two or three wicker chairs lay about the lawn outside it, and they sat down. Now for the first time he could form a just estimate of his companion's beauty, and he experienced some difficulty in removing his glance from her. The stay at Brineweald had tanned her face, and deepened the warm colour of her skin, and though the recent vigils had somewhat deadened the brilliance of her eyes, they still flashed with a dignity and independence that were a warning to any one who might have thoughts of perpetrating an indiscretion in her presence.

Lord Henry tugged at his mesh, and wondered whether he had better proceed. This girl's secret, wrapped as it was in her pride and, worse still, in her vanity, seemed a very sacred thing to penetrate. Never had he felt that divination could lie so close to desecration as when he watched this magnificent creature before him, making her last proud stand in front of the humiliating cause of her breakdown. His heart went out to her, however; he suddenly felt the impulse, not of the trained psychologist to cure a patient, but of a gallant knight to save a beautiful lady in distress. He was prepared to use every weapon in order to defeat the dragon, and as his strongest weapons seemed to be his deep knowledge of the human soul, and his long experience in curing it, he proceeded on his old lines. But how different he was, notwithstanding, from the Lord Henry of the Ashbury Sanatorium none knew better than himself. He could no longer be cool and collected. He must fight with the girl against the canker in her heart as if he himself also felt the pain of it. He must tear it out and save her peace of mind, like the therapeutist that he was; but he could not help also being the fellow-sufferer, so deeply did he feel that he wished to share her woe and her fears.

"Well," he said, "I was beginning to tell you why you wished to lead me astray."

"I didn't wish to lead you astray," she cried, almost desperate lest he should guess the truth.

"Very often," Lord Henry continued, "we can confide in a friend concerning a blow directed at our hearts, in fact that is actually one of the uses of friendship. But it is difficult sometimes to confess the pain of a blow levelled at our self-esteem, at our vanity."

He looked discreetly away as he spoke, but he noticed that she stirred at this point.

"Not only your heart and your womanly yearnings are at stake here, Miss Delarayne," he pursued. "These when they are thwarted simply make one sweetly miserable, languorously self-commiserating,--but it is your pride and vanity that are concerned."

She regarded him now as one magnetised, hypnotised, petrified.

If every line of his face, and every sign in his whole person had not convinced her of his exceptional character, she would have fled his presence even now, never to confront him again.

"These are real savages when they are provoked," he went on suavely.

"What do they care for the destruction their anger brings upon your body? They would devastate your whole beauty without scruple in order to calm their tempestuous rage. They begin by undermining the trust you feel in your own claims. They then proceed to keep you awake at night and to toss you about in your bed, when you ought to be refreshing your body with sleep; and, finally, when they have ravished your sleep, they open your mind to all the hideous spectres and shapes that are always waiting, like hungry unemployed, to get busy in a wakeful and anxious brain."

"Lord Henry!" gasped the girl, starting as if to rise.

"I am saying these things for you, Miss Delarayne," he said quickly, "because it is perhaps too much to expect you to say them yourself, and because you will find that their expression will relieve you. Oh, if I can only do that,--surely----"

She looked at him for a moment and noted the fervour in his face, the energy in his hands, and the honest nobility of his eyes; and anxious as she now felt to escape from his terrifying presence, she was riveted by his personality and could not move.

"It was not only the prospect of having all your life to stroke the cheeks of other people's children, Miss Delarayne, that you dreaded.

This is a natural, noble, splendid dread, it is true, which every woman worthy of the name should feel when she reaches your age. But there is something far more poisonous, far more harmful to your system in the present situation, and that is the thought that you may have all your life to stroke the cheeks of other people's children, thanks to a creature who, delightful as she may be, you nevertheless rightly regard not only as your subordinate, not only as your junior both in age and claims, but also as one towards whom it is loathsome to you to feel any such feelings as rivalry."

Cleopatra gripped the arms of her wicker chair, and turned eyes full of horror upon her companion.

"It is this that is slowly causing your strength to ebb," he went on; "it is this acid which is corroding your life."

She gasped. "But it is a very real and additional pain," she exclaimed hoarsely.

"It is, of course," he assented. "It would be absurd to ignore it. Just as it would be absurd to ignore the extra filip which your presence, or your part in the business, adds to this, Leonetta's first affair. For what is a man to her, after all? Another feather in her cap,--another bauble! She has left school and her maiden's vanity,--we'll call it self-esteem,--bids her at once try to confirm the high claims she rightly thinks her beauty and her sex entitle her to make upon the world. She wants to win her first crown as May Queen. No deeper passion is involved. And should a man be induced, in his arrogance, to take these first steps of hers seriously, she would regret all her life what was merely a schoolgirl's whim. For society would take no pity on her, and would compel her to spend her life with a creature of whom she had only solicited the flattery of a season."

Cleopatra bowed her head, and toyed nervously with a bracelet. She was breathing heavily, but was now showing no desire to escape.

"But there is a difference, a very deep difference," he continued, "between the purchaser of a pearl necklet and the purchaser of a loaf of bread. The first is acquiring merely another ornament, another set-off to her beauty, another weapon in the fight for supremacy, and she performs the act with a frivolous smile. The other is obtaining a primitive and fundamental necessity, and she does it solemnly, aware as she is of its real uses. The first is the schoolgirl receiving her first attentions from a man; the second is the woman of passion who knows what life has promised her."

"Lord Henry," Cleopatra ejaculated, "how wonderfully you understand!"

"What aggravates your pain a thousandfold is the thought you are being robbed of a necessity, by one who uses it as a toy. You feel as a starving child might feel who sees the loaf that has been snatched from him being used as a football."

A tear trickled down Cleopatra's face. "That is wonderfully true," she assented, and brushed the tear quickly away.

He paused and looked at her for a moment beneath lowered brows. A wonderful serenity had come upon her, and her lips no longer seemed tormented with words they did not dare to utter.

"What is so terrible, Lord Henry," she said at last, "what the world does not seem to understand, and will not see, is that a girl with a sister is placed in intimate, daily, and inevitable contact with the very woman who is her most constant and most formidable rival. She sees her grow up and gradually assume womanly shape. She watches the development of every feature with eyes starting out of her head with horror. While her sister is at the gawky age, she gets a short breathing space, because a child at that time is so clumsy, so unattractive and foolish. But all of a sudden this vanishes. The child becomes a woman, startlingly beautiful and seductive. She realises it herself, and naturally wants her successes, as Baby did."

"Who's Baby?" Lord Henry interrupted.

"My sister, Leonetta."

"Oh, I see--go on."

"Then you do everything you can to make her feel she is not grown up yet. But it is hopeless. In vain you try to thrust her back into childhood----"

"By calling her 'Baby' instead of 'Leonetta,' for instance," said Lord Henry.

"Oh, of course!" Cleopatra cried. "I didn't think of that." Then she continued after a while, "But of course they want to shine, and you can do nothing. You are expected to love them, cherish them; you are even expected to take an interest in their clothes, in their hair! You even have to go and help put the finishing touches, when all the time you dread seeing her dressed up. It is excruciating, it is brutal. It is inhuman, Lord Henry! Shall I tell you the truth,--though it's dreadful, wicked. Well, _I hate_ my sister. I loathe her with a deadly loathing.

My fingers itch to--oh, all through the night I think of some means of disfiguring her. It is the most diabolical cruelty to put any woman into the position I am in now. I long to fly away, where I shall never, never see her again. It's that and nothing else that has given me these fainting fits. I have controlled my loathing too long. One day, if only fate is kind, I shall fall down and be killed."

She collapsed at the end of this tirade, and burst into a torrent of tears. There was no affectation about that flood. It was the expression of real anguish, of long-pent-up suffering, and Lord Henry knew what infinite good it would do.

"Come, come, Miss Delarayne!" he exclaimed, still fearing that the humiliation of the discovery, despite the relief it gave, would prove too much for her immensely proud nature. "I share your secret now. I am strong. You will feel my strength with you. You are no longer alone. You will not have any more of these fainting fits."

She still sobbed, and it was heartrending to Lord Henry to watch her.