admirers, most of them endowed with long purses and long pedigrees, at least three or four times a week.  Doris was occasionally asked and sometimes went.  But she was suffering all the time from an initial discouragement and depression, which took away self-reliance, and left her awkwardly conscious.  She struggled, but in vain.  The world into which Arthur was being so suddenly swept was strange to her, and in many ways antipathetic; but had she been happy and in spirits she could have grappled with it, or rather she could have lost herself in Arthur’s success.  Had she not always been his slave?  But she was not happy!  In their obscure days she had been Arthur’s best friend, as well as his wife.  And it was the old comradeship which was failing her; encroached upon, filched from her, by other women; and especially by this exacting, absorbing woman, whose craze for Arthur Meadows’s society was rapidly becoming an amusement and a scandal even to those well acquainted with her previous records of the same sort.

* * * * *

The end of July arrived.  The Dunstables left town.  At a concert, for which she had herself sent them tickets, Lady Dunstable met Doris and her husband, the night before she departed.

“In ten days we shall expect you at Pitlochry,” she said, smiling, to Arthur Meadows, as she swept past them in the corridor.  Then, pausing, she held out a perfunctory hand to Doris.

“And we really can’t persuade you to come too?”

The tone was careless and patronising.  It brought the sudden red to Doris’s cheek.  For one moment she was tempted to say—­“Thank you—­since you are so kind—­after all, why not?”—­just that she might see the change in those large, malicious eyes—­might catch their owner unawares, for once.  But, as usual, nerve failed her.  She merely said that her drawing would keep her all August in town; and that London, empty, was the best possible place for work.  Lady Dunstable nodded and passed on.

The ten days flew.  Meadows, kept to it by Doris, was very busy preparing another lecture for publication in an English review.  Doris, meanwhile, got his clothes ready, and affected a uniformly cheerful and indifferent demeanour.  On Arthur’s last evening at home, however, he came suddenly into the sitting-room, where Doris was sewing on some final buttons, and after fidgeting about a little, with occasional glances at his wife, he said abruptly: 

“I say, Doris, I won’t go if you’re going to take it like this.”

She turned upon him.

“Like what?”

“Oh, don’t pretend!” was the impatient reply.  “You know very well that you hate my going to Scotland!”

Doris, all on edge, and smarting under the too Jovian look and frown with which he surveyed her from the hearthrug, declared that, as it was not a case of her going to Scotland, but of his, she was entirely indifferent.  If he enjoyed it, he was quite right to go. She was going to enjoy her work in Uncle Charles’s studio.