“Perks never told me,” muttered Molly.

“I should think they must suit the house to perfection.  Where have you put them?”

“In the small dining-room.”

“Yes; they must do admirably there.  I should like to see them again.”  He looked at her with a faintly sarcastic smile.  She knew what he intended her to say, and, against her will, she said hastily: 

“Won’t you come and see them?”

“With great pleasure.”

Molly saw that Adela had risen, and sprang up and turned away in one sudden movement.  She was very angry with him for forcing her to say that, and she could not conceive what had made her yield.

“‘The teeth that bite; the claws that scratch,’” he thought to himself, “but safely chained up—­and the movements are beautiful.”  He stood looking after her.

“I did as you told me,” said the hostess, pausing for a moment as she followed her guests to the door.  “If Molly blames me, shall I say that you asked to take her in?”

“Say just what you like; I trust you entirely.”  He did not attempt to speak to Molly after dinner, or when they met again at a ball that same night.  All her burning wish to snub him could not be gratified.  He seemed not to know shat she was still in the room.  But she knew instinctively that he watched her, and she was not sorry he should see her in the crowd, and be witness, however unwillingly, to her position in the world he knew so well.  It added to the sense of intoxication that often possessed her now.  “Be drunken,” says Baudelaire, “be drunken with wine, with poetry, with virtue, with what you will, only be drunken.”  And that Molly could be drunken with flattery, with luxury, with movement, with music, with a sense of danger that gave a strong and subtle flavour to her pleasures, was the explanation (and the only one) of how she bore the hours of reaction, of the nausea experienced by that spiritual nature of hers which she had been so surprised to discover.  It was not the half-shrinking, half-defiant Molly Edmund had talked to in the woods of Groombridge, whom he watched now.  That Molly was gone, and he regretted her.

CHAPTER XXVII

MOLLY’S APPEAL

Edmund, it seemed, was in no hurry to see his Florentine looking-glasses again.  Ten days passed before he called on Molly, and on the eleventh day Mr. Murray, Junior, wrote to say that he had some fresh and important intelligence to give him, and asked if Sir Edmund would call, not at his office, but at his own house.

Edmund flung the letter down impatiently.  The situation was really a very trying one.  He did not believe—­he could not and would not believe—­that Molly was carrying on a gigantic fraud.  Murray was a lawyer, and did not know Miss Dexter; his suspicions were inhuman and absurd.  From the day on which she had spoken to him about her mother’s reply to her offer to go to Florence,