He looked very ill, but Lady Clyde at the moment could only realise to what straits he had brought Rita, and with what surly unresponsiveness he seemed to confront her courageous acceptance of poverty. Lady Clyde asked her husband that night if he could not, as man to man, give Richard Lambourne a hint that his ungracious attitude to his wife, whilst living on her money, was the final crown of the wrongs that he had done her. “I was going to suggest, personally, that you should give Rita a hint,” said Sir Charles. “Rita! Why, when I think of that poor child’s gallantry----” “Exactly. My own impression is that a very little more of it will drive Lambourne into a mad-house, or worse.” Sir Charles spoke in his usual level accents, and Lady Clyde did not attempt to attach any meaning to his words. Neither did they recur to her when Richard Lambourne disproved her assertion that he had placed the crown upon the wrongs done to his wife, by the final ignominy of suicide. * * * * * “Coward, coward!” sobbed Lady Clyde. “Can you deny that he was a coward, Charles?” “No. Richard was a coward,” said Sir Charles gravely. “After all that poor little Rita had done!” “And said,” added Sir Charles, not flippantly, and half under his breath. The old magnate who had admired Rita at her wedding made use of almost the same words as Lady Clyde. “After all that his wife had done, and was doing, to quit like that, and leave her to face the life he’d brought her to! What a _brute_!” A little while afterwards he proposed to Rita, diffident, in spite of his wealth, because of the great difference in their ages. She accepted him, and this time it was Sir Charles, looking at the bridegroom’s bald head and infirm gait beside the pretty bride at the quiet wedding, who repeated to himself the old man’s catchword, with an ironical emphasis of his own: “A _very_ gallant little lady.” THE HOTEL CHILD THE HOTEL CHILD (TO Y. DE LA P.) I The first time that I saw her was in Rome. I was governess to the children at the British Embassy, and every morning before breakfast I took them out into the Borghese Gardens. They were very good, insignificant little children, and never gave me any trouble. Whilst they played tame little games between the grey-green olive trees, I used to watch the more amusing Italian children in the Gardens, the biggest groups consisting of pupils from the great white Convento dell’ Assunzione, on the corner of the Pincio.