Honora loved.  Many times in her life had she believed herself to have had this sensation, and yet had known nothing of these aches and ecstasies!  Her mortal body, unattended, went out to dinner that evening.  Never, it is said, was her success more pronounced.  The charm of Randolph Leffingwell, which had fascinated the nobility of three kingdoms, had descended on her, and hostesses had discovered that she possessed the magic touch necessary to make a dinner complete.  Her quality, as we know, was not wit:  it was something as old as the world, as new as modern psychology.  It was, in short, the power to stimulate.  She infused a sense of well-being; and ordinary people, in her presence, surprised themselves by saying clever things.

Lord Ayllington, a lean, hard-riding gentleman, who was supposed to be on the verge of contracting an alliance with the eldest of the Grenfell girls, regretted that Mrs. Spence was neither unmarried nor an heiress.

“You know,” he said to Cecil Grainger, who happened to be gracing his wife’s dinner-party, “she’s the sort of woman for whom a man might consent to live in Venice.”

“And she’s the sort of woman,” replied, “a man couldn’t get to go to Venice.”

Lord Ayllington’s sigh was a proof of an intimate knowledge of the world.

“I suppose not,” he said.  “It’s always so.  And there are few American women who would throw everything overboard for a grand passion.”

“You ought to see her on the beach,” Mr. Grainger suggested.

“I intend to,” said Ayllington.  “By the way, not a few of your American women get divorced, and keep their cake and eat it, too.  It’s a bit difficult, here at Newport, for a stranger, you know.”

“I’m willing to bet,” declared Mr. Grainger, “that it doesn’t pay.  When you’re divorced and married again you’ve got to keep up appearances—­the first time you don’t.  Some of these people are working pretty hard.”

Whereupon, for the Englishman’s enlightenment, he recounted a little gossip.

This, of course, was in the smoking room.  In the drawing-room, Mrs. Grainger’s cousin did not escape, and the biography was the subject of laughter.

“You see something of him, I hear,” remarked Mrs. Playfair, a lady the deficiency of whose neck was supplied by jewels, and whose conversation sounded like liquid coming out of an inverted bottle.  “Is he really serious about the biography?”

“You’ll have to ask Mr. Grainger,” replied Honora.

“Hugh ought to marry,” Mrs. Grenfell observed.

“Why did he come back?” inquired another who had just returned from a prolonged residence abroad.  “Was there a woman in the case?”

“Put it in the plural, and you’ll be nearer right,” laughed Mrs. Grenfell, and added to Honora, “You’d best take care, my dear, he’s dangerous.”