She cares for nothing, he tells himself:  nothing! He has married a mere butterfly; yet how pretty the butterfly is, lying back there in that huge armchair, her picturesque little figure flung carelessly into artistic curves, her soft, velvety head rubbing itself restlessly amongst the amber cushions.  The cushions had been in one of the drawing-rooms, but she had declared he was frightfully uncomfortable in his horrid old den, and has insisted on making him a handsome present of them.  She seems to him the very incarnation of exquisite idleness, the idleness that knows no thought.

“Very good,” says he at last.  “If you refuse to make up a list of your friends, help me to make up a list of mine.  You know you said you would like to fill the house.”

“Ye—­es,” says she, as if meditating.

“Of course, if you don’t want any people here——­”

“But I do.  I do really.  I hate being alone!” cries she, springing into sudden life and leaning forward with her hands clasped on her knees.

“How few rings you have!” says he suddenly.

CHAPTER XV.

HOW TITA TELLS OF TWO STRANGE DREAMS, AND OF HOW THEY MOVED HER.  AND HOW MAURICE SETS HIS SOUL ON ASKING A GUEST TO OAKDEAN; AND HOW HE GAINS HIS DESIRE.

“Not one, except this,” touching her engagement ring.  “That you have given me.”

“You don’t care for them, then?”

“Yes I do.  I love them, but there was nobody to give them to me.  I was very young, you see, when poor daddy died.”

She stops; her mouth takes a mournful curve; the large gray eyes look with a sort of intensity through the windows to something—­something beyond—­but something that Rylton cannot see.  After all, is she so trivial?  She cares, at all events, for the memory of that dead father.  Rylton regards her with interest.

_ “He_ would have given me rings,” she says.

It is so childish, so absurd, that Rylton wonders why he doesn’t want to laugh.  But the little sad face, with the gray eyes filled with tears, checks any mirth he might have felt.  A sudden longing to give her another ring, when next he goes to town, fills his heart.

“Well! what about our guests?”

Her tone startles him.  He looks up.  All the tears, the grief are gone; she is the gay, laughing Tita that he thinks he knows.

“Well, what?” His tone is a little cold.  She is superficial, certainly.  “If you decline to ask your friends——­”

“I don’t decline.  It is only that I have no friends,” declares she.

There is something too deliberate in her manner to be quite natural, and Rylton looks at her.  She returns his glance with something of mockery in hers.

“It isn’t nice to be married to a mere nobody, is it?” says she, showing her pretty teeth in a rather malicious little laugh.