“Well, I came in when he’d left and found Nan sitting like a stone statue, gazing blankly in front of her.  She wouldn’t say much, but bit by bit I dragged it out of her.  Since then she has never referred to the matter again.  She is quite gay at times in a sort of artificial way, but she doesn’t do any work, though she spends odd moments fooling about at the piano.  She goes out morning, noon, and night, and comes back dead-beat, apparently not having enjoyed herself at all.  Can you imagine Nan like that?”

“Not very easily.”

“I believe he’s taken the savour out of things for her,” said Penelope, adding slowly, in a voice that was quite unlike her usual practical tones:  “Brushed the bloom off the world for her.”

“Poor old Nan!  She must be hard hit. . . .  She’s never been hurt badly before.”

“Never—­before she met that man.  I can’t forgive him, Kitty.  I’m horribly afraid what sort of effect this miserable affair is going to have on a girl of Nan’s queer temperament.”

Kitty turned the matter over in her mind in silence.  Then with a small, sage nod of her red head, she advanced a suggestion.

“Bring her over to dinner to-morrow—­no, not to-morrow, I’m booked.  Say Thursday, and I’ll have a nice man to meet her.  She needs someone to play around with.  There’s nothing like another man to knock the first one out of a woman’s head.  It’s cure by homeopathy.”

Penelope smiled dubiously.

“It’s a bit of bad luck on the second man, isn’t it—­if he’s nice?  You know, Nan is rather fatal to the peace of the male mind.”

“Oh, the man I’m thinking of has himself well in hand.  He’s a novelist—­and finds safety in numbers.  His mother was French.”

“And Nan’s great-grandmother.  Kitty, is it wise?”

“Extreme measures are sometimes necessary.  He and she will hit it off together at once, I know.”

As Kitty finished speaking there came a trill at the front-door bell, followed a minute later by a masculine knock on the door.

“Come in,” cried Penelope.

The door opened to admit a tall, fair man who somehow reminded one of a big, genial Newfoundland.

“I’ve called for my wife,” he said, shaking hands with.  Penelope, and smiling down at her with a pair of lazily humorous blue eyes.  “Can I have her?”

“In a minute, Barry”—­Kitty nodded at him cheerfully.  “We’re just settling plans about Nan.”

“Nan?  I should have imagined that young woman was very capable of making her own plans,” returned Barry Seymour, letting his long length down into a chair.  “In fact, I was under the impression she’d already made ’em,” he added with a grin.

“No, they’re unsettled at present,” returned Kitty.  “She’s not very keen about Maryon Rooke now.”  Kitty was of the opinion that you should never tell even the best of husbands more than he need know.  “So we think she requires distraction,” she pursued firmly.