“I used to be fond of that one when I was a youngster,” he explained apologetically to her as they went out, and little Sid had settled himself obediently on the pillow once more.  “It was when I dreamed,” he added, “of less prosaic occupations than the stock market.”

Sidney Dallam had dreamed!

Although Lily Dallam had declared that to leave her house before midnight was to insult her, it was half-past eleven when Honora and her husband reached home.  He halted smilingly in her doorway as she took off her wrap and laid it over a chair.

“Well, Honora,” he asked, “how do you like—­the whirl of fashion?”

She turned to him with one of those rapid and bewildering movements that sometimes characterized her, and put her arms on his shoulders.

“What a dear old stay-at-home you were, Howard,” she said.  “I wonder what would have happened to you if I hadn’t rescued you in the nick of time!  Own up that you like—­a little variety in life.”

Being a man, he qualified his approval.

“I didn’t have a bad time,” he admitted.  “I had a talk with Brent after dinner, and I think I’ve got him interested in a little scheme.  It’s a strange thing that Sid Dallam was never able to do any business with him.  If I can put this through, coming to Quicksands will have been worth while.”  He paused a moment, and added:  “Brent seems to have taken quite a shine to you, Honora.”

She dropped her arms, and going over to her dressing table, unclasped a pin on the front of her gown.

“I imagine,” she answered, in an indifferent tone, “that he acts so with every new woman he meets.”

Howard remained for a while in the doorway, seemingly about to speak.  Then he turned on his heel, and she heard him go into his own room.

Far into the night she lay awake, the various incidents of the evening, like magic lantern views, thrown with bewildering rapidity on the screen of her mind.  At last she was launched into life, and the days of her isolation gone by forever.  She was in the centre of things.  And yet —­well, nothing could be perfect.  Perhaps she demanded too much.  Once or twice, in the intimate and somewhat uproarious badinage that had been tossed back and forth in the drawing-room after dinner, her delicacy had been offended:  an air of revelry had prevailed, enhanced by the arrival of whiskey-and-soda on a tray.  And at the time she had been caught up by an excitement in the grip of which she still found herself.  She had been aware, as she tried to talk to Warren Trowbridge, of Trixton Brent’s glance, and of a certain hostility from Mrs. Chandos that caused her now to grow warm with a kind of shame when she thought of it.  But she could not deny that this man had for her a fascination.  There was in him an insolent sense of power, of scarcely veiled contempt for the company in which he found himself.  And she asked herself, in this mood of introspection, whether a little of his contempt for Lily Dallam’s guests had not been communicated from him to her.