After all, Molly had not returned Miss Vanbrugh’s call. And this was not because she was jealous of her, but because when it came to the point she found she had not the courage. In Hero’s presence, in the light of her candid eyes, the pretence of being a lady could not be kept up. Perhaps Hero guessed how matters stood, for when she found that Lady Alistair did not come to her she made the experiment of coming again to Beers Cooperage. And Molly was very glad to see her. To her own surprise, she found her once dreaded rival was her only friend. They grew to call each other by their Christian names. And by degrees Molly opened her heart to Hero, and told her everything; told her one day, with tears and sobs, the story of her miserable life, and wound up with the despairing cry: “I shall never be any better; I know I shan’t. I can’t be sorry. I can’t repent.” Hero held out her arms. When she reached home that evening she found the bosom of her dress all streaked with rouge. Alistair’s wife was not blinded by the respectful homage of the Comte des Louvres to his true character. Her instinct told her that the Count had no friendships which did not serve some purpose of his own, and she warned Alistair against him. “Beware of that man,” she said one day after the Frenchman had been to see them. “He pretends to be your friend, but he is scheming to get something out of you.” “Most friends are,” was Alistair’s retort. “Of course, Des Louvres is a scoundrel, but he is an interesting one. Honest men are such bores.” And in that remark Alistair expressed more of his character than he knew. Perhaps the strongest of all the motives that stirred him to quarrel with the social order in which he had been reared was that he found it dull. He judged of life like a novel--it is the villain who is the soul of the plot. If he had been born fifty years before, Alistair Stuart might have been happily engaged among those who were struggling for the emancipation of Europe from the old Legitimist régime. Political liberty, the liberty that Shelley had hymned, and Mazzini plotted, and Garibaldi fought for, seemed a Dead Sea fruit to his taste, but yet at least the struggle for it had been worth waging. To-day nothing interesting, nothing heroic, was going on in the world. The glorious dawn of the nineteenth century had been succeeded by a commonplace day. The struggles of the hour were for markets and mines; the question that moved men’s souls was whether Mike Finigan should be compelled to hide his glass of beer from the respectable sight of Mr. Stiggins. Liberalism was dead, and the social democracy marching over its corpse had discarded every noble watchword, every lofty ideal, and proclaimed the naked issue of more wages and less work. They and the millionaires might fight it out between them as far as such as Alistair were concerned. Neither side seemed likely to add anything to the beauty of life.