he would tell her his small adventures if only that she might laugh at him.  But Sheila did not laugh.  She was greatly delighted to have this talk about the hills and the deer and the wet mornings.  She forgot all about the dinner before her.  The servants whipped off successive plates without her seeing anything of them:  they received random answers about wine, so that she had three full glasses standing by her untouched.  She was no more in Holland Park at that moment than were the wild animals of which she spoke so proudly and lovingly.  If the great and frail masses of flowers on the table brought her any perfume at all, it was a scent of peat-smoke.  Lord Arthur thought that his companion was a little too frank and confiding, or rather that she would have been had she been talking to any one but himself.  He rather liked it.  He was pleased to have established friendly relations with a pretty woman in so short a space; but ought not her husband to give her a hint about not admitting all and sundry to the enjoyment of these favors?  Perhaps, too, Lord Arthur felt bound to admit to himself there were some men who more than others inspired confidence in women.  He laid no claims to being a fascinating person, but he had had his share of success, and considered that Sheila showed discrimination as well as good-nature in talking so to him.  There was, after all, no necessity for her husband to warn her.  She would know how to guard against admitting all men to a like intimacy.  In the mean time he was very well pleased to be sitting beside this pretty and agreeable companion, who had an abundant fund of good spirits, and who showed no sort of conscious embarrassment in thanking you with a bright look of her eyes or by a smile when you told her something that pleased or amused her.

But these flattering little speculations were doomed to receive a sudden check.  The juvenile M.P. began to remark that a shade occasionally crossed the face of his fair companion, and that she sometimes looked a little anxiously across the table, where Mr. Lavender and Mrs. Lorraine were seated, half hidden from view by a heap of silver and flowers in the middle of the board.  But though they could not easily be seen, except at such moments as they turned to address some neighbor, they could be distinctly enough heard when there was any lull in the general conversation.  And what Sheila heard did not please her.  She began to like that fair, clear-eyed young woman less.  Perhaps her husband meant nothing by the fashion in which he talked of marriage and the condition of a married man, but she would rather have not heard him talk so.  Moreover, she was aware that in the gentlest possible fashion Mrs. Lorraine was making fun of her companion, and exposing him to small and graceful shafts of ridicule; while he seemed, on the whole, to enjoy these attacks.