Her reply allayed his misgivings. It was confirmed by her demeanour when they met. Indeed, her display of even more good fellowship than usual made him feel rather guilty. She seemed to divine his reflections, and to assure him that such self-reproach was needless. She had never been brighter or more informal with him than in the hansom as they drove down. Her air implied that their previous interview had been a trivial folly which, as sensible people, they must banish from their minds, and she talked of everything and nothing with the gaiety of a schoolgirl on an unforeseen excursion, and the piquancy of a woman who had observed and lived. Her vivacity was infectious, and Kent's constraint gradually melted in a rush of the warmest gratitude for her forbearance. He was so entirely at her mercy here, and he thought that few women similarly placed would have refrained from planting at least one little sting among their verbal honey. His admiration began to comprise details. He remarked the hat she wore, and the delicacy of a little ear against her hair's duskiness. He noted with pleasure the quick, petulant twitch of a corner of her mouth as her veil got in the way, and the appreciative gaze of young men in the cabs that rolled towards them--a gaze which invariably terminated in a swift scrutiny of the charming woman's companion. When the hotel was reached, he had never been livelier; and, often as he had read an opposite opinion, he found it very delightful to see the woman he was in love with eat, and drink her champagne. It was intimate, it lessened the _noli me tangere_ mien of feminine fashion and brought her closer. The attire of an attractive woman who has never belonged to him has always a mystery for a man, though he may have had three wives and kept a dressmaker's shop. But liveliness was succeeded by a vaguer emotion, as they lounged on the terrace over their coffee and liqueurs. Under the moon the river shone divine, limitless in its glint and shadow. Her features took tenderness from the tremulous light, and sometimes a silence fell which, as he yielded himself to the subtile endearment of the moment, soft as the breath of love on his face, Kent felt to be the supplement of speech. A woman who could have uttered epigrams in the mood that possessed him now would have disgusted him, and insensibly their tones sank. She spoke gently, seriously. Presently some allusion that she made begot a confidence about her earlier life--her marriage. It disturbed him to hear that she had been fond of Deane-Pitt when she married him, yet he was grieved when she owned how quickly her illusions had died. Her belief that she might have been "a better woman" if she had married a different man was pathetic in its revelation of unsuspected heart-aches, and sympathy made him execrate the feebleness of words. Her voice acquired an earnestness that he had never heard in it before, and while he was