“You would like the game of politics too much to spoil it, Kitty.”  His voice broke and lingered on the name.  “You would want to be a great lady and lead the party.”

“Should I?  Could you ever teach me how to behave?”

“You would learn by nature.  Do you know, Kitty, how clever you are?”

“Yes,” she sighed.  “I am clever.  But there is always something that hinders—­that brings failure.”

“How old are you?” he said, laughing.  “Eighteen—­or eighty?”

Suddenly he put out his arms, enfolding her.  And she, still sobbing, raised her hands, clasped them round his neck, and clung to him like a child.

“Oh!  I knew—­I knew—­when I first saw your face.  I had been so miserable all day—­and then you looked at me—­and I wanted to tell you all.  Oh, I adore you—­I adore you!” Their faces met.  Ashe tasted a moment of rapture; and knew himself free at last of the great company of poets and of lovers.

They slipped back to the house, and Ashe saw her disappear by a door on the farther side of the orangery—­noiselessly, without a sound.  Except that just at the last she drew him to her and breathed a sacred whisper in his ear.

“Oh! what—­what will Lady Tranmore say?”

Then she fled.  But she left her question behind her, and when the dawn came Ashe found that he had spent half the night in trying anew to frame some sort of an answer to it.

PART II

THREE YEARS AFTER

“The world an ancient murderer is.”

VII

“Her ladyship will be in before six, my lady.  I was to be sure and ask you to wait, if you came before, and to tell you that her ladyship had gone to Madame Fanchette about her dress for the ball.”

So said Lady Kitty’s maid.  Lady Tranmore hesitated, then said she would wait, and asked that Master Henry might be brought down.

The maid went for the child, and Lady Tranmore entered the drawing-room.  The Ashes had been settled since their marriage in a house in Hill Street—­a house to which Kitty had lost her heart at first sight.  It was old and distinguished, covered here and there with eighteenth-century decoration, once, no doubt, a little florid and coarse beside the finer work of the period, but now agreeably blunted and mellowed by time.  Kitty had had her impetuous and decided way with the furnishing of it; and, though Lady Tranmore professed to admire it, the result was, in truth, too French and too pagan for her taste.  Her own room reflected the rising worship of Morris and Burse-Jones, of which, indeed, she had been an adept from the beginning.  Her walls were covered by the well-known pomegranate or jasmine or sunflower patterns; her hangings were of a mystic greenish-blue; her pictures were drawn either from the Italian primitives or their modern followers.  Celtic romance, Christian symbolism,