“You don’t say so!” said Lord Elterton, feigning innocence.  “I thought they were a most devoted couple!”—­Laura would be a safe draw, and although he would not believe half he should hear, out of the bundle of chaff he possibly could collect some grains of wheat which might come in useful.

“Devoted couple!” she laughed.  “Tristram is by no means the first with her.  There is a very handsome foreign gentleman, looking like Romeo, or Rizzio—­”

“Or any other ‘O,’” put in Lord Elterton.

“Exactly—­in whom she is much more interested.  Poor Tristram!  He has plenty to discover, I fear.”

“How do you come to know about it?  You are a wonder, Lady Highford—­always so full of interesting information!”

“I happened to see them at Waterloo together—­evidently just arrived from somewhere—­and Tristram thought she was safe in Paris!  Poor dear!”

“You have told him about it, of course?”—­anxiously.

“I did just give him a hint.”

“That was wise.”  And Lord Elterton smiled blandly and she did not see the twinkle in his eye.  “He was naturally grateful?” he asked sympathetically.

“Not now, perhaps, but some day he will be!”

Laura’s light hazel eyes flashed, and Lord Elterton laughed again as he answered lightly,

“There certainly is a poor spirit in the old boy if he doesn’t feel under a lifelong obligation to you for your goodness.  I should, if it were me.—­Look, though, we shall have to go now; they are beginning to say good night.”

And as they found the others he thought to himself, “Well, men may be poachers like I am, but I am hanged if they are such weasels as women!”

Lady Anningford joined Lady Ethelrida that night in her room, after they had seen Zara to hers, and they began at once upon the topic which was thrilling them all.

“There is something the matter, Ethelrida, darling,” Lady Anningford said.  “I have talked to Tristram for a long time to-night, and, although he was bravely trying to hide it, he was bitterly miserable; spoke recklessly of life one minute, and resignedly the next; and then asked me, with an air as if in an abstract discussion, whether Hector and Theodora were really happy—­because she had been a widow.  And when I said, ‘Yes, ideally so,’ and that they never want to be dragged away from Bracondale, he said, so awfully sadly, ’Oh, I dare-say; but then they have children.’  It is too pitiful to hear him, after only a week!  What can it be?  What can have happened in the time?”

“It is not since, Anne,” Ethelrida said, beginning to unfasten her dress.  “It was always like that.  She had just the look in her eyes the night we all first met her, at Mr. Markrute’s at dinner—­that strange, angry, pained, sorrowful look, as though she were a furnace of resentment against some fate.  I remember an old colored picture we had on a screen—­it is now in the housekeeper’s room—­it was one of those badly-drawn, lurid scenes of prisoners being dragged off to Siberia in the snow, and there was a woman in it who had just been separated from her husband and baby and who had exactly the same expression.  It used to haunt me as a child, and Mamma had it taken out of the old nursery.  And Zara’s eyes haunt me now in the same way.”