Godfrey looked as if he had been suddenly hit in the face; he turned a deep red and leant forward towards his host—his very queer host. He was too shaken up to be ready with a reply. Lucinda sat motionless, apparently aloof from the scene. But a very faint smile was still on her lips. “What the devil’s the use of this sort of thing?” I expostulated—in a purely conventional spirit, with one’s traditional reprobation of “scenes.” My feeling somehow went no deeper. It seemed then an inevitable thing that these three should have it out, before they went their several ways; the conventions were all broken between them. “Because the truth’s good for him—and for me; for both of us who trafficked in her.” Lucinda suddenly interposed, in a delicate scorn, an unsparing truthfulness. “It’s only because you’ve failed yourself that you’re angry with him, Arsenio. Let him alone; he’s had enough truth from me this afternoon—and a lot of good advice. I told him to go home—to Nina Dundrannan. And for Heaven’s sake don’t talk about ‘trafficking,’ as if you were some kind of a social reformer!” She turned to me, actually laughing; and I began to laugh too. Well, Godfrey looked absurd—like a dog being whipped by two people at once, not knowing which he most wanted to bite, not sure whether he dared bite either—possibly thinking also of a third whipping which would certainly befall him if he followed Lucinda’s good advice. And Arsenio, cruelly let down from his heroics, looked funnily crestfallen too. He was not allowed to be picturesquely, rhetorically indignant—not with Godfrey, not even with himself! “Besides,” she added, “he did offer to stick to his engagement to lunch with me that day at Cimiez!” The mock admiration and gratitude with which she recalled this valiant deed—to which she might, in my opinion, well have dedicated a friendlier tone, since it was no slight exploit for him to beard his Nina in that fashion—put a limit to poor Godfrey’s tongue-tied endurance. “Yes, you were ready enough to take my lunches, and what else you could get!” he sneered. Lucinda gave me just a glance; here was a business reckoner indeed! Of course he had some right on his side, but he saw his right so carnally; why couldn’t he have told her that they’d been friends—and who could be only a friend to her? That was what, I expect, he meant in his heart; but his instincts were blunt, and he had been lashed into soreness. Still, though I was feeling for him to that extent, I could not help returning Lucinda’s glance with a smile, while Arsenio chuckled in an exasperating fashion. It was small wonder really that he pushed back his chair from the table and, looking round at the company, groaned out, “Oh, damn the lot of you!”