Nor was Mrs. Dollond’s verdict upon their acquaintance, who had become for the space of seven days an intimate, more complimentary.

“I suppose he was better than nobody,” she remarked with philosophy as they made their way up the terrace.  “He looked after my stakes, and did not play much himself, and was always at hand; but he was really very dull.”

“Better than me, I suppose you mean, my dear?” suggested her husband humorously.  “Was he so dull?  You ought to know; I really have hardly spoken to him.”

“Don’t be absurd!” she remarked absently.  Then she said a little abruptly:  “It seems funny, now that one knows him, that there should be those stories.”

“Stories?  About Rainham?”

Her husband glanced at her with some surprise.

“Yes,” she said.  “Of course, you never know anything; but he is talked about.”

“Ah, poor man!” said Mr. Dollond.  “What has he done?”

Mrs. Dollond’s fair eyebrows were arched significantly, and Mrs. Dollond’s gay shoulders shrugged with a gesture of elision, in which the essence of many scandals, generated and discussed in the discreet undertones of the ladies’ hour, was nicely distributed.

“Don’t be dense, Hugh!  It is quite notorious!”

Mr. Dollond laughed his broad, tolerant laugh.

“Well,” he said, “I should never have thought it.”

Rainham, reaching his hotel the same afternoon, met Mrs. Engel in the hall; her formal bow, in which frosty disapproval of the sin, and a widow’s tenderness for the middle-aged sinner, if repentant, were discreetly mingled, amused if it scarcely flattered him.  He was still smiling at his recollection of the interview when the Swiss porter, accosting him in elaborately bad English, informed him that a lady and gentleman, who had left on the previous evening, had made particular inquiries after him.  The name, he confessed, escaped him, but if Monsieur pleased——­ He produced the visitors’ book, in which Rainham read, scarcely now with surprise, the brief inscription, “Mr. and Mrs. Lightmark, from Cannes.”

CHAPTER XVII

There was a ceaseless hum of voices in the labyrinth of brilliant rooms, with their atmosphere of transient spring sunshine and permeating, faint odour of fresh paint.  Few people came to see the pictures, which covered the walls with a crude patchwork of seas and goddesses, portraits and landscapes:  all that by popular repute were worth seeing had been exhibited already to the people who were now invited to view them,—­at the studios on Show Sunday, and on the Outsiders’ Day.  One entered the gloomy gates of Burlington House on the yearly occasion of the Private View because it was, socially, a great public function, in order to see the celebrities, who were sure to be there, from the latest actress to the newest bishop.  In one corner a belated critic endeavoured to scratch hasty impressions on his shirt-cuff