“I expected too much,” he answered.  “I know it very well.  Forgive me, and let us forget.”

She rose to her feet.

“I do not know that you will ever regret this,” she said.  “I pray that you may.”

To Brooks she seemed the same charming woman as usual, as he heard her light laugh come floating across the hall, and bowed over her white fingers.  But Sybil saw the over-bright eyes and nervous mouth and had hard work to keep back the tears.  She piled the cushions about a dark corner of the divan, and chattered away recklessly.

“This is a night of sorrows,” she exclaimed, pouring out the tea.  “Mr. Brooks and I were in the midst of a most affecting leave-taking—­when the tea came.  Why do these mundane things always break in upon the most sacred moments?”

“Life,” Lady Caroom said, helping herself recklessly to muffin, “is such a wonderful mixture of the real and the fanciful, the actual and the sentimental, one is always treading on the heels of the other.  The little man who turns the handle must have lots of fun.”

“If only he has a sense of humour,” Brooks interposed.  “After all, though, it is the grisly, ugly things which float to the top.  One has to probe always for the beautiful, and it requires our rarest and most difficult sense to apprehend the humorous.”

Lord Arranmore stirred his tea slowly.  His face was like the face of a carved image.  Only Brooks seemed still unconscious of the shadow which was stalking amongst them.

“We talk of life so glibly,” he said.  “It is a pity that we cannot realize its simplest elements.  Life is purely subjective.  Nothing exists except in our point of view.  So we are continually making and marring our own lives and the lives of other people by a word, an action, a thought.”

“Dear me!” Lady Caroom murmured.  “How-ever shall I be able to play bridge after tea if you all try to addle my brain by paradoxes and subtle sayings beforehand!  What does Arranmore mean?”

He put down his cup.

“Do not dare to understand me,” he said.  “It is the most sincere unkindness when one talks only to answer.  And as for bridge—­remember that this is a night of mourning.  Bridge is far too frivolous a pursuit.”

“Bridge a frivolous pursuit?” Sybil exclaimed.  “Heavens, what sacrilege.  What ought we to do, Lord Arranmore?”

“Sit in sackcloth and ashes, and hear Brooks lecture on the poor,” he answered, lightly.  “Brooks is a mixture of the sentimentalist and the hideous pessimist, you know, and it is the privilege of his years to be sometimes in earnest.  I know nothing more depressing than to listen to a man who is in earnest.”

“You are getting positively light-headed,” Sybil laughed.  “I can see no pleasure in life save that which comes from an earnest pursuit of things, good or evil.”

“My dear child,” Lord Arranmore answered, “when you are a little older you will know that to take life seriously is a sheer impossibility.  You may think that you are doing it, but you are not.”