have taken a malicious pleasure in encouraging St. Michael in his confidences, and in watching Francesca’s discomfiture under the recital.  The irritated manner in which she had cut short the discussion betrayed the fact, that, as far as the old woman’s information went, it was Comus and not Courtenay Youghal who held the field.  And in this particular case Lady Caroline’s information was likely to be nearer the truth than St. Michael’s confident gossip.

Francesca always gave a penny to the first crossing-sweeper or match-seller she chanced across after a successful sitting at bridge.  This afternoon she had come out of the fray some fifteen shillings to the bad, but she gave two pennies to a crossing-sweeper at the north-west corner of Berkeley Square as a sort of thank-offering to the Gods.

CHAPTER VIII

It was a fresh rain-repentant afternoon, following a morning that had been sultry and torrentially wet by turns; the sort of afternoon that impels people to talk graciously of the rain as having done a lot of good, its chief merit in their eyes probably having been its recognition of the art of moderation.  Also it was an afternoon that invited bodily activity after the convalescent languor of the earlier part of the day.  Elaine had instinctively found her way into her riding-habit and sent an order down to the stables—­a blessed oasis that still smelt sweetly of horse and hay and cleanliness in a world that reeked of petrol, and now she set her mare at a smart pace through a succession of long-stretching country lanes.  She was due some time that afternoon at a garden-party, but she rode with determination in an opposite direction.  In the first place neither Comus or Courtenay would be at the party, which fact seemed to remove any valid reason that could be thought of for inviting her attendance thereat; in the second place about a hundred human beings would be gathered there, and human gatherings were not her most crying need at the present moment.  Since her last encounter with her wooers, under the cedars in her own garden, Elaine realised that she was either very happy or cruelly unhappy, she could not quite determine which.  She seemed to have what she most wanted in the world lying at her feet, and she was dreadfully uncertain in her more reflective moments whether she really wanted to stretch out her hand and take it.  It was all very like some situation in an Arabian Nights tale or a story of Pagan Hellas, and consequently the more puzzling and disconcerting to a girl brought up on the methodical lines of Victorian Christianity.  Her appeal court was in permanent session these last few days, but it gave no decisions, at least none that she would listen to.  And the ride on her fast light-stepping little mare, alone and unattended, through the fresh-smelling leafy lanes into unexplored country, seemed just what she wanted at the moment.  The mare made some small delicate pretence of being roadshy, not the staring dolt-like kind of nervousness that shows itself in an irritating hanging-back as each conspicuous wayside object presents itself, but the nerve-flutter of an imaginative animal that merely results in a quick whisk of the head and a swifter bound forward.  She might have paraphrased the mental attitude of the immortalised Peter Bell into