She said it sweetly.  If she had been bitter she would have (as she expressed it) “choked him off”; but Lady Cayley knew better than to be bitter now, at thirty-seven.  She had learnt that her power was in her sweetness.

His face softened (from the other end of the room Anne saw it soften), and Lady Cayley pursued with soundless feet her fugitive advantage.

“Poor Wallie, you needn’t look so frightened.  I’m quite safe now, or soon will be.  Didn’t I tell you I was going there too?  I’m going to be married.”

“I’m delighted to hear it,” he said stiffly.

“To a perfect angel,” said she.

“Really?  If you’re going up to heaven, he, I take it, is not coming down to earth.”

“Nothing is settled,” said Lady Cayley, with such monstrous gravity that his stiffness melted, and he laughed outright.

Anne heard him.

“Who, if I may ask, is this celestial, this transcendent being?”

She shook her head.  “I can’t tell you, yet.”

“What, isn’t even that settled?”

Majendie was so genuinely diverted at that moment that he would not have left her if he could.

She took the sting of it, and flushed, dumbly.  Remorse seized him, and he sought to soothe her.

“My dear lady, I had a vision of heavenly hosts standing round you in such quantities that it might be difficult to make a selection, you know.”

She rallied finely under the reviving compliment.  “My dear, it’s a case of quality, not quantity—­” Her past was so present to them both that he almost understood her to say, “this time.”

“I see,” he said.  “The wings.  But nothing’s settled?”

“It’s settled right enough,” said she, by which he understood her to imply that the “angel’s” case was.  She had settled him.  Majendie could see her doing it.  His imagination played lightly with the preposterous idea.  He conceived her in the act of bringing down her bird of heaven, actually “winging him.”

“But it’s not given out yet.”

“I see.”

“You’re the first I’ve told, except Topsy.  Topsy knows it.  So you mustn’t tell anybody else.”

“I never tell anybody anything,” said he.

He gathered that it was not quite so settled as she wished him to suppose, and that Lady Cayley anticipated some possible dashing of the cup of matrimony from her lips.

“So I’m not to have panics, in the night, and palpitations, every time I think of it?”

“Certainly not, if it rests with me.”

“I wanted you to know.  But it’s so precious, I’m afraid of losing it.  Nothing,” said Lady Cayley, “can make up for the loss of a good man’s love.  Except,” she added, “a good woman’s.”

“Quite so,” he assented coldly, with horror at his perception of her drift.

His coldness riled her.

“Who,” said she with emphasis, “is the lady who keeps making those awful eyes at us over Pussy’s top-knot?”