"We want one other man," said Madeleine, reflectively, after a few more had passed through the needle's eye of Sir Henry's criticism. "Let me see. Oh, there's Captain Tempest. He dances well." "I won't have him," said Sir Henry at once, his eyes assuming their most prawnlike expression. "You may have his cousin if you like, the owl with the jowl, as Lumley calls him--Tempest of Overleigh." "He is sure to be asked to the house itself, being a relation," said Madeleine, dropping the subject of Archie instantly. She did not recur to it again. But after their return home from the visit to the Hemsworths', at which she had met Di, she told her husband she had invited Di for the fancy ball, as he had wished her to do. "Me?" said Sir Henry, reddening. "Lord bless me, what do I want with her?" And it was some time before he could be made to recollect what he had said nearly a month ago about asking Di to meet Lord Hemsworth. "You forget your own wishes more quickly than I do," she said, putting her hand in his. He did, by Jove, he did; and he bent over the little hand and kissed it, while she noticed how red the back of his neck was. When he became unusually apoplectic in appearance, as at this moment, Madeleine always caught a glimpse of herself as a young widow, and the idea softened her towards him. If he were once really gone, without any possibility of return, she felt that she could have said, "Poor Henry!" "The only awkward part about having asked Di," said Madeleine, after a pause, "is that Mrs. Courtenay does not allow her to visit alone." "Well, my dear, ask Mrs. Courtenay. I like her. She has always been very civil to me." She had indeed. "I don't like her very much myself," said Madeleine. "She is so worldly; and I think she has made Di so. And she would be the only older person. You know you decided it should be a _young_ party this time. It is very awkward Di not being able to come alone, at her age. She evidently wanted me to ask her brother to bring her, who, she almost told me, was anxious to meet Miss Crupps, the carpet heiress; but I did not quite like to ask him without your leave." "Ask him by all means," said Sir Henry, entirely oblivious of his former refusal. "After that poor little girl, is he? Well, we'll sit out together, and watch the lovemaking, eh?" Madeleine experienced a tremor wholly unmixed with compunction at gaining her point. She would have been aware, if she had read it in a book, that any one who had acted as she had done, had departed from the truth in suggesting that Di could not visit alone. She would have felt also that it was reprehensible in the extreme to invite to her house a man who had secretly, though not without provocation, made love to her since her marriage. But just in the same way that what we regret as conceit in others we perceive to be a legitimate self-respect in ourselves, so Madeleine, as on previous occasions, "saw things very differently."