But Lilian saw him often.  Perhaps she never went out without seeing him, perhaps she never remained at home that he did not come in:  going by the parlor-door half a dozen times a day, nothing was easier.  In fact, few men have friends who think it worth their while to pay such attentions to another’s chosen wife as this friend of John’s did.  To-day he gave flowers and helped her heap them in the vases; on the morrow he brought in for inspection a borrowed portfolio of the wonderful water—­colors that some mad artist had dashed off among the painted canons, or brought perhaps the artist himself; when he was absent he wrote her letters, sent to John’s care indeed, and conveying messages to John—­letters full of what John called Reyburn’s transcendental twaddle, but which were meat and drink to Lilian, living half alone in her world of fancy; when he was in town again he took her through galleries of pictures and statues where John had not an entree; he placed his opera-box at her disposal; and when John, who insisted on her acceptance of Reyburn’s courtesies, heard them talk together about the mysteries of the music or the ballet there, he could have found it possible to question the justice of Fate that had mated such spirit with such clod in giving Lilian to himself—­for he felt that she was already given, and they were mated by their long affection beyond all divorce but death’s—­could have found it possible to question the justice of Fate if he had not remembered, with a sort of pain, that, charming and brilliant as Reyburn was, having a sweet and reckless gayety and generosity, winning friends who loved him almost as men love women, he was nevertheless as inconstant as the breeze that rifles a rose.

“Yes,” said he one day, in speaking of Reyburn to Lilian as they looked at him through the open door of the drawing-room—­“yes, we men may love Reyburn safely enough, as we ask for no devotion in return, but woe be to the woman who builds her house on that sand!”

“Will it slide away?” asked Lilian, not glancing from her needle.

“Well—­Look at him now.  Possession palls on him, they say.  Half an hour ago he plucked that bud.  If it had hung as high as heaven, he would have climbed for it, having once set his heart on it, and have been tireless till he got it.  On the whole, the thing is lucky that he did not tear it to pieces in his dissecting love of laying bare its heart.  He has been inhaling its delicious soul this half hour:  let us see what he does with it.”  And as they looked they saw Reyburn lift the half-forgotten flower, whose pale bloom had begun to tarnish ever so little, glance at it lightly and give it a careless fillip to the marble floor of the hall where he was walking up and down, and where, as he came back, he set his heel upon it without knowing that he did so.