"No, no, Dick! I know it'll give you a certain amount of trouble"--the older man looked attentively at the younger--"but I've felt lately that we didn't see enough people. I don't see why my state and Athena's selfishness"--he uttered the word very deliberately--"should force you to live such an unnatural life as you've now been leading for so long----" He waited a moment and then said, more lightly, "I'm afraid that we both, you and I, have grown to believe that Jane Oglander's the only young woman in the world." Wantele gave him a swift look. "She's the only woman in the world for me," he muttered. "Lingard may be a good fellow, Richard, but I wish--I would give a good deal to know what Jane sees in him." He also was trying to speak lightly. "Ah, one always feels that!" Richard Maule lay back in his chair. The short discussion had tired him. "Then will you see about it all, Dick?" "Yes," cried Wantele hastily, "of course I will! I agree that we've been too much shut up." He went back to Athena, and this time she welcomed him graciously. She also had received letters asking for a peep of their hero. Wantele looked at his cousin's wife with reluctant admiration. He had not seen her looking as animated, as radiant as--as seductive as she looked now for a very long time. "Don't you see the change in Richard?" she asked eagerly. "He's become quite another creature since General Lingard came here. I've always thought you kept Richard far too much shut up, Dick----" "You never said so before," he said sharply. She shrugged her shoulders. "It was none of my business." Her face clouded, and with hasty accord they changed the subject, and with exactly the same words: "Who had we better ask first?" And then they stopped, and laughed. For the moment these two, Richard Maule's heir and Richard Maule's wife, were on more cordial terms than they had been for years. "You have now got all the letters," she cried gaily--"Richard's, mine, and yours! Look them over, and make out a list--I'm sure you're much better at that sort of thing than I am!" He left her to carry out her behest. If there was anything like real entertaining to be done at Rede Place, all kinds of arrangements would have to be made, and the making of them must fall on Dick Wantele. Athena had told the truth when she had described herself to General Lingard as only a guest in her husband's house. But she had omitted to add that it was an arrangement which had hitherto suited her perfectly, and the only one she would have tolerated. CHAPTER VIII "To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance." During the days that followed Dick Wantele's return home, it seemed to him as though a magic wand had been waved over Rede Place.