The week of her retirement passed pleasantly enough. She doctored her bruised lips, mended their torn skin, and argued occasionally with her shameful soul. The quiet life of silent hours in the midst of civilised balms partially restored her courage, but not as entirely as she could wish. Piecing her broken nerves together as best she could, she strove to remount the pinnacle of supreme and self-sufficient egotism whence she had fallen. But Humpty-Dumpty could not be set up again, try as she might to replace him. During those brooding hours Leah recovered much, but not all. The week's end found her cured of the skin-deep blow, and outwardly the same insolent, radiant beauty of an adoring world. But she knew herself to be a changed being; the pantheress had become a hare, although less innocent. The sword of her tongue was still sharp, but the shield of self-righteousness was broken, and a keen-eyed antagonist sufficiently assertive could have reduced her to the same moral pulp that the interview with Demetrius had left her. Woe to the vanquished indeed! What remained but that she should receive the wooden foil of retirement from Destiny and leave the arena for ever. Her soul protested against this tame submission, so with indomitable courage she braced herself to further battle. With the world, that is, not with Demetrius. His abominable kiss had sapped her forces. She could face social enemies, she could defy the Eternal, she could encounter the fiends of hell, but not the man who had flung her into the dust--who had trailed her, and was still trailing her, at his chariot wheels. Certainly he had steamed into the unknown, and she would never behold him more. But his black influence remained and made itself felt at untoward moments. Jim paid his promised visit almost at the end of her seclusion, and was disposed to be disagreeable on the plea that his wife had lied unnecessarily. Being truthful himself, when there was nothing to be gained by swerving from the path of rectitude, Jim abhorred a wasted fib, and proceeded to condemn Leah for shooting an aimless arrow from her mental quiver. It was the most pensive hour of the summer twilight when Jim began his sermon, and he preached in his wife's sitting-room. Darby sat beside Joan, who lay languidly on a sofa. What a perfect and touching picture of connubial felicity! If only a reporter of backstair gossip had been present to describe this middle-class domesticity of these great leaders of fashion, Brixton might have learned an edifying lesson from Belgravia. "Now I do call it hard on a fellow," complained the Duke--"jolly hard--that you can't talk straight, Leah." "If I did you would scarcely feel flattered. What is it now?" "Aksakoff! Says he was never near Southend. Swore till all was blue that he'd never set eyes on that girl for months an' months." "A sad deprivation for so affectionate a father." "Well, then, he wants to know where she is."