He laughed unpleasantly.

“You are scarcely complimentary,” he remarked.

“I did not mean to be,” she answered.  “Why should I?”

“You are content, then, to let your husband drift back into his old relations with the Duchess?  I presume that you know what they were?”

“Whether I am or not,” she answered, “what business is it of yours?”

“I will tell you, if you like,” he answered.  “In fact, I think it would be better.  It has been the one desire of my life to marry the Duchess of Lenchester myself.”

She smiled at him scornfully.

“Come,” she said, “let me give you a little advice.  Give up the idea.  They say that lookers-on see most of the game, and so far as I am concerned I’m certainly the looker-on of this party.  The Duchess doesn’t care a row of pins about you!”

“There are other marriages, besides marriages of affection,” Sir Leslie said, stiffly.  “The Duchess is ambitious.”

“But she is also a woman,” Blanche declared.  “And she is in love.”

“With whom?”

“With my husband!  I presume that is clear enough to most people!”

Sir Leslie was a little staggered.

“You take it very coolly,” he remarked.

“Why not?  The Duchess is too proud a woman to give herself away, and my husband—­belongs to me!”

“You haven’t any idea of taking poison, or anything of that sort, I suppose, have you?” he inquired.  “The other woman nearly always does that.”

“Not in real life,” Blanche answered, composedly.  “Besides, I’m not the other woman—­I’m the one.  The Duchess is the other!”

“But your husband—­”

“Do you know, I should prefer not to discuss my husband—­with you,” Blanche said, calmly, taking up her book.  “He is not the sort of man you would be at all likely to understand.  If you want a rich wife why don’t you propose to Clara Mannering?  I suppose you knew that some unheard-of aunt had left her fifty thousand pounds?”

Sir Leslie rose to his feet.

“I don’t fancy that you and I are very sympathetic this afternoon,” he remarked.  “I will go and see if any one has returned.”

“Do,” she answered.  “I shall miss you, of course, but my book is positively absorbing, and I am dying to go on with it.”

Sir Leslie left the garden without another word.  Blanche held her book before her face until he had disappeared.  Then it slipped from her fingers.  She looked hard into a cluster of roses, and she saw only two figures—­always the same figures.  Her eyes were set, her face was wan and old.

“The other woman!” she murmured to herself.  “That is what I am.  And I can’t live up to it.  I ought to take poison, or get run over or something, and I know very well I shan’t.  Bother the man!  Why couldn’t he leave me alone?”

After dinner that evening she accepted her husband’s nightly invitation and walked with him for a little while.  The others followed.