She made an effort to rise. He assisted her, and leaning heavily on his arm she walked with him slowly towards Sandlewood. It was after six.

Neither spoke until the village was in sight, and then he asked if she knew of any place in it where they could dine. "Not that it really matters," he added, "because we don't want anything very substantial."

She said that she supposed the inn would be the best place.

To the inn they therefore went, and while the innkeeper's wife prepared tea for them and boiled a few eggs, they walked over to the village church.

"Stephen has a flesh wound, no more, in the shoulder. Nobody else is hurt," he said as they sauntered along. "I have dressed the wound, and a doctor has been fetched. He was actually able to walk to the house. I told them it was an accident, that I was not skilled in the use of rook-rifles. Of course they believed me. Why shouldn't they? I want you to promise not to show me up. It was all my fault, and I may surely be allowed to come out of it with only an accident against my name?"

"I don't care who knows. I don't care what happens!" Cleopatra exclaimed hoarsely. "You needn't imagine I want you to shield me. I did it on purpose, and they must know I did it on purpose."

Lord Henry frowned. "Yes, quite so," he continued. "You have suffered so much of late that you disbelieve in anything but unhappiness. You feel it must be interminable. It was all my fault. You fancy that you are alone, with a bitter hostile world arrayed against you. And since the world is your enemy, what do you care what the enemy thinks of you? Very natural too! That is what you feel. If only, if only, Leonetta had not been so slow in walking home this morning! It was hard luck on me that you should have been driven to this, because I was aiming at something so very different. However, it seems even harder luck that you should imagine that you were driven to it by me. But fancy! only a flesh wound in the shoulder, and it's all over! God! how thankful I am. And they must believe it was my accident. For did I not come to do you good, and had I not succeeded?"

"Better have left me alone," exclaimed the girl with a bitter smile. "I wish I could go away. I want to leave this hateful place!"

"Wherever you go, whatever you do, understand," said Lord Henry, "I am going to stick close to you. So don't imagine you can drive me away."

She stopped a moment. They had reached the churchyard, and she extended an arm to the nearest tree to steady herself.

"Why don't you leave me?" she demanded. "Can't you see that I have been tormented enough? I hate everything and everybody! I want to forget; I want to be alone."

Lord Henry was silent and led the way back to the inn.

"You are doing what hundreds have done before you," he observed after a while, "and always with disastrous results. You are condemning a man unheard. Until this morning I was your friend, your most useful ally here. You knew it, you felt it. I did everything in my power to bring about a change in the balance of advantages, which was all in your favour. You saw the proof of this. You drew strength from the very change I created. You know you did; you cannot deny it. I worked with zeal and with effect. God! if I worked with the same zeal for all my patients I should be dead in a fortnight."

"Well?" she cried.

"Then you were told something by third parties,--something that seemed to destroy in an instant all the careful work of my three days here. You believed that there was only one interpretation of this thing, and that was that my purpose all along had been so hazy and my nature so capricious and irresponsible that I had suddenly resolved to reverse the whole of the elaborate machinery which I had set in motion to re-establish your health and spirits;--and what for?--in order, if you please, to win the flattering smile of a mere child! Do you imagine that even my love for your wonderful mother would ever have allowed me to right-about-wheel all of a sudden in that ridiculous fashion? Come, Cleopatra, be reasonable."

She averted her gaze, and her eyes began to well with tears.

"No, you have known the thing to happen before, and therefore you were the more readily convinced that it had happened again. You had no faith because your faith had been cruelly broken. But, believe me, although I did this action this morning chiefly on your account and Leonetta's, and partly also on account of a great friend of mine whom you do not yet know, I swear I should never have undertaken it if I had dreamt for an instant that it was going to cost you as much as a single tear."

The girl put her handkerchief to her eyes. "I'm afraid I don't understand," she said. "It all seems so mysterious. I only know that, one after another, you all seem to go the same way."

Lord Henry sighed. "Come," he said, offering her his arm again; "let me make myself clear to you."

But she was too convulsed with sobs to move. The situation was certainly difficult.

He waited, and looked for a while away from her.

"Besides," she cried at last, "you don't really know what I wanted to do, otherwise--otherwise--Oh! it's too dreadful!"

He swung round. "I know everything," he rejoined.

"You can't really want to keep me beside you then."

He smiled sadly. "And why not, in all conscience!"

She wiped her eyes quickly and frowned darkly at him.

"Lord Henry, are you fooling me?" she ejaculated. "Don't you know that a moment ago I was intent only on one thing, and that was----"

She choked and could go no further.

He walked up to her and laid a hand on her arm. "I tell you I know everything," he repeated.

"You pretend that you know," she sneered.

He smiled and bowed his head. "If you mean," he suggested, "that two hours ago you were firing from that ambush with the definite intention of doing Leonetta some mortal injury, I need hardly say----"

"Yes," she said fiercely, "I do mean that."

"Of course I knew that," he observed. "Don't imagine I had any doubt about that. When I first came up to you I was convinced of it. What else could you have been doing?"

She scrutinised him intently. "Well, then?" she stammered.

"If only you will be good enough to walk back to the inn with me," he said, again offering her his arm, "I'll explain everything to you."

"All right, walk on!" she said, declining his proffered assistance.

And then, as they walked, he began to unfold to her his reasons for his behaviour with Leonetta in the woods that morning. He explained how he had reckoned that he would be back in time to tell her first, and that had it not been for the fury of Denis's indignation, he would certainly have succeeded.

They reached the inn and repaired to the bar parlour, and over the frugal meal he continued his explanation. She listened intently, raised an objection from time to time, which he deftly parried, and thus gradually the whole story was made plain to her. She revived visibly under the effects of the refreshment, and the precise and convincing manner of his narrative; and when at last the complete chain of consequence had been revealed to her, he left her very much recovered while he went in search of some vehicle to convey them back to "The Fastness."

In about twenty minutes he returned with a broken-down old brougham--the only vehicle the village possessed,--and in a moment they were rattling away slowly in the direction of Brineweald.

"Then what made you look for me with such anxiety?" she enquired, once they were well on their way. "Why did you guess so positively that something tragic would happen? Why didn't you simply assume that my fainting fits had returned?"

He caught her hand in his.

"My dear Cleo," he replied, "perhaps I am disgustingly arrogant, perhaps I am quite unfit for decent society, but it occurred to me that your fainting fits had been, not the outcome of thwarted passion, but the result of mortified vanity. You never loved Denis. I felt somehow that in this instance, not your vanity alone, but your deepest passions were involved, and that when you would act from thwarted passion, either against yourself, against me, or against Leonetta, you would proceed to violence. Was I wrong? Was I hopelessly vain and foolish to imagine that in this instance, because I was concerned and not Denis, therefore something more tragic was to be expected?"

She looked away and a smile began to dawn on her tortured features.

"What about Baby?" she demanded after a while. "Did you consider her feelings?"

"Did I consider her feelings? How can you ask me that, seeing that I was leaving no stone unturned to save her from the toils of an arch-flappist?"

She almost laughed.

"But didn't you go unnecessarily far with the poor kid?"

"Only as far as I was obliged to go to effect my purpose. But do you suppose I am only the second man with whom she has flirted heavily? Do you suppose I am even the sixth? I took care that she should realise that it was only a rag. She is deep and she is passionate. She knows what a good rag is. And she will behave very differently, I can assure you, when she meets the man with whom she feels she cannot play without burning her pretty fingers. She won't accept his first overtures so readily, believe me. She will be too terrified, as all decent women are when they are truly and deeply moved. She won't even yield so very quickly to his repeated overtures. She will realise that the affair is too deep, too committing, too final for that."

"But didn't you kiss her?" Cleopatra enquired.

"Of course I did," replied Lord Henry, chuckling quite heartily now.

"But is not a man entitled to kiss his future sister-in-law?"