The ingenuous self-love of Lord Arthur Redburn, M.P., was severely wounded by the notion that, after all, he had been made a cat’s-paw of by a jealous wife.  He had been flattered by this girl’s exceeding friendliness; he had given her credit for a genuine impulsiveness which seemed to him as pleasing as it was uncommon; and he had, with the moderation expected of a man in politics who hoped some day to assist in the government of the nation by accepting a junior lordship, admired her.  But was it all pretence?  Was she paying court to him merely to annoy her husband?  Had her enthusiasm about the shooting of red-deer been prompted by a wish to attract a certain pair of eyes at the other side of the table?  Lord Arthur began to sneer at himself for having been duped.  He ought to have known.  Women were as much women in a Hebridean island as in Bayswater.  He began to treat Sheila with a little more coolness, while she became more and more preoccupied with the couple across the table, and sometimes was innocently rude in answering his questions somewhat at random.

When the ladies were going into the drawing-room, Mrs. Lorraine put her hand within Sheila’s arm and led her to the entrance to the conservatory.  “I hope we shall be friends,” she said.

“I hope so,” said Sheila, not very warmly.

“Until you get better acquainted with your husband’s friends you will feel rather lonely at being left as at present, I suppose.”

“A little,” said Sheila.

“It is a silly thing altogether.  If men smoked after dinner I could understand it.  But they merely sit, looking at wine they don’t drink, talking a few common-places and yawning.”

“Why do they do it, then?” said Sheila.

“They don’t do it everywhere.  But here we keep to the manners and customs of the ancients.”

“What do you know about the manners of the ancients?” said Mrs. Kavanagh, tapping her daughter’s shoulder; as she passed with a sheet of music.

“I have studied them frequently, mamma,” said the daughter with composure, “—­in the monkey-house at the Zoological Gardens.”

The mamma smiled, and passed on to place the music on the piano.  Sheila did not understand what her companion had said; and indeed Mrs. Lorraine immediately turned, with the same calm, fine face and careless eyes, to ask Sheila whether she would not, by and by, sing one of those northern songs of which Mr. Lavender had told her.

A tall girl, with her back hair tied in a knot and her costume copied from a well-known pre-Raphaelite drawing, sat down to the piano and sang a mystic song of the present day, in which the moon, the stars and other natural objects behaved strangely, and were somehow mixed up with the appeal of a maiden who demanded that her dead lover should be reclaimed from the sea.

“Do you ever go down to your husband’s studio?” said Mrs. Lorraine.

Sheila glanced toward the lady at the piano.