so far as a declaration of love.  Something in Mavis’s demeanour suggested a dispassionate summing up of their desires and limitations, in which the latter made the former appear a trifle ridiculous, and restrained the words that were ever on their tongues.  This propensity on the part of men who, Mavis thought, ought to know better, occasioned her much disquiet.  She confided these tribulations to Lady Ludlow’s ear.

“Men are all alike all the world over,” remarked the latter, on hearing Mavis’s complaint.  “You can’t trust ’em further than you can see ’em.”

“Not all, surely,” replied Mavis, thinking of the innocuous young men, indigenous to Shepherd’s Bush, whom she had so often danced with at “Poulter’s.”

“Anyhow, men in our class of life are all at one on that point.  Directly they see a pretty woman, their one idea is to get hold of her.”

“I wouldn’t believe it, unless I’d seen for myself the truth of it.”

“It’s a great pity all of our sex didn’t realise it; but then it would make the untempted more morally righteous than ever,” declared Lady Ludlow.

“But if a man really and truly loves a woman—­”

“That’s another story altogether.  A woman is always safe with the man who loves her.”

“Because his love is her best protection?”

“Assuredly.”

The sudden reflection that Perigal had never really loved her produced, strangely enough, in Mavis a sharp but short-lived revulsion of feeling in his favour.  On the whole, Mavis’s, heart inclined to social gaiety.  To begin with, the constant change afforded by a succession of events which, although all of a piece, were to her unseasoned senses ever varying, provided some relief from the remorse and suffering that were always more or less in possession of her heart.  Also, having for all her life been cut off from the gaieties natural to her age and kind, her present innocent dissipations were a satisfaction of this long repressed social instinct.

But, at all times, Windebank’s conduct was a puzzle.  Although he had the run of the house, although scarcely a day passed without Mavis seeing a good deal of him, he never betrayed by word or look the love which Miss Toombs declared burned within him for Mavis.  He had left the service in order to devote more time to his Wiltshire property, but his duties seemed to consist chiefly in making himself useful to Mavis or her husband.  Womanlike, Mavis would sometimes try to discover her power over him, but although no trouble was too great for him to take in order to oblige her, Mavis’s most provoking moods neither weakened his allegiance nor made him other than his calm, collected self.

“No!  Miss Toombs is mistaken,” thought Mavis.  “He doesn’t love me; he but understands and pities me.”