bears down on us.  That’s why they love us and detest the prigs.  Here we are at your house.  I hope you don’t keep your maid up for you.  I would scorn to keep a girl out of her bed for the sake of brushing my hair.  Good-night, dear, and dream of the paradise that awaits you—­a paradise in which there are birds to be shot, birds of paradise to make feather fans for women who hold them to their bosoms one minute, and the next dispose of them to Mr. and Mme. Abednego with last season’s opera wrap.  There’s a parable for you to sleep upon.”

“And you—­you?” cried Phyllis.

“Oh, as for me, I’ll, I’ll—­well, I think I’ll put my meteor fan on the pillow beside my own to-night.  I’m still newfangled with my toy and—­well, I’m a woman.”

At this instant the carriage pulled up to Mr. Ayrton’s hall door and the footman jumped down from the box to run up the steps and ring the bell.

“Good-night,” said Phyllis.  “I enjoyed my evening greatly, and the drive home best of all.”

Ella Linton’s laugh was smothered among the delicate floss of the feathers which she held up to her face.

CHAPTER X.

IT IS THE PRICE OF BLOOD.

Phyllis had a good deal to think of after she had sat for half an hour with her father in the room where they worked together for the discomfiture of the opposite party, and had given him some account of the representation of the play at the Parthenon.  Her father was delighted to find her in high spirits.  So many people come back from the theater looking glum and worn out, yawning and mumbling when asked what they have seen and what it had all been about.  Phyllis was not glum, nor did she mumble.  She was able to describe scene after scene, and more than once she sprang from her seat, carried away by her own powers of description, and began to act the bits that had impressed her—­bits the force of which could only be understood when described with gestures and pretty posturing.

Her father thought he had never seen anything so pretty in his life.  (What a girl she was, to be sure, to have so easily recovered from the effects of that terrible ordeal through which she had passed—­having to dismiss at a moment’s notice the man whom she had promised to marry!) He had certainly never seen anything so fascinating as her pretty posturing, with the electric lights gleaming over her white neck with its gracious curves, and her firm white arms from which her gloves had been stripped.

It had been his intention to describe to her a scene which had taken place in the House of Commons that night—­a scene of Celt and Saxon mingling in wild turmoil over a question of neglected duty on the part of a Government official:  not the one who was subsequently decorated by the sovereign a few days after his neglect of duty had placed the country in jeopardy, and had precipitated the downfall of the ministry and the annihilation of his party