"St. Ignatius never wasted time over insincere women."
"I am not insincere," she said frankly. "I own I may seem so. But you are not kind, and some day you may be sorry for this."
Her eyes filled with tears--which he noticed and attributed to fatigue.
"I wonder how men ever accomplish anything!" she exclaimed.
"They have no insight. They mistake self-control for coldness, and despair for flippancy. Isn't that the case?"
"One can be light and true as well as light and false. Now you are witty, beautiful, brilliant--but you don't always ring true."
She seemed confused for a minute, and hung her head.
"All the same," she said, suddenly, "I am always sincere with you. It is not in my power to be so with every one. 'Fate overrules my will.'"
Then he wished her goodbye, promising, however, to call again with regard to the Meeting. Lord Garrow met him on the staircase.
"I congratulate you on your election to Brookes's," stammered his lordship, "but for Heaven's sake be cautious at play. Really, the younger men there are trying to revive the worst traditions in gaming. The loo was rather high at Chetwynd's last night," he added, with a studied air of guilt. "I won £500 from my host. I call that the limit--even on old Cabinet Steinberg!"
He smiled, he waved his hand, feeling that he had displayed great taste in a situation of enormous difficulty. Something unusual, too, in the young man's face touched his heart. It seemed to him that here was one who had felt the world's buffets.
"I have never been just in my estimate of Mr. Orange," said he to Sara, as he re-entered the drawing-room. "I quite took to him to-day. He has a fine countenance, and I am sure he is very much cut up by this painful affair. It's a pity he's a Catholic, for he would make such an excellent canon for St. Paul's. He would _look_ the part so well."
"'Happiness, that nymph with unreturning feet,' has passed him by," said Sara, watching herself in one of the mirrors.
"She has passed a good many," sighed his lordship. "But play me that lovely air which Titiens sings in _Il Flauto Magico_."
Agnes was too ill to appear at the Duchess of Pevensey's dinner that evening. Lord Reckage's melancholy, absent air during the entertainment, and his early withdrawal from the distinguished party, were referred, with sympathy, to the very proper distress he felt at Miss Carillon's tiresome indisposition. The time passed well enough for him--far better, in fact, than he had expected, for he was relieved from the strain of "dancing attendance" on his betrothed--a thing which he, even more than most men, found silly. In the chivalrous days of tournaments, troubadours and crusades this romantic exercise of seeming enslaved was, he held, justifiable, even interesting. But in modern life it had an appearance of over-emphasis.