Laurence loved Paris. It was she who had hinted, in her pretty girlish way, at a speedy installation there, where she knew so many people--friends of her uncle and aunt, acquaintances made during her stay at Seton Park, Wiltshire, and Seton House, Belgravia; her summer cruises on the _Phyllis_; her short sojourns with Uncle Bob and Aunt Elizabeth at seaside or mountain resorts. Before these she ardently desired to appear in her new _Glanz und Pracht_, these who had seen her in the character of a dependent--and what a bounty that had been! But what did Basil know about these little secret plans? What indeed! He had found it quite natural for a young girl, full of life and of the joy of life, to want to spend her first married winter in the city of worldly pleasure _par excellence_. At that moment, however, he began to question the wisdom of his having so readily assented to her wishes. He felt that it might have been better for him to have done otherwise, to have begun by making her thoroughly acquainted with her adopted land, her adopted nationality, her new hereditary dignities and duties. Yes, the welfare of his own people was dear indeed to him, and a flying trip to his chief estate, where she had been greeted and fêted like a young queen, served but little to initiate her to what his life among them, as their suzerain, had really been. With a puzzled frown he leaned his head against the cold glass. “We belong,” he mused, “to utterly discrepant generations. I am so irredeemably slow and old-fashioned; she is so intensely modern!” He gave his shoulders a shake of dissatisfaction at these shortcomings of his. Then he began to pace moodily back and forth before the huge fireplace. “Oh yes,” he reflected, sadly, “I suppose I will always be saying and doing things she will instinctively dislike and resent, and if she really is of a jealous disposition--” He stopped, pulled fiercely at his mustache, and resumed his pacings and his futile cogitations until his brain grew tired. Truly this night’s unfortunate events had suddenly disclosed to him an altogether undreamed-of horizon line, and it was difficult to see what lay concealed beyond it. Assuredly Laurence, had she but known it, would have done better to put her hand in the fire, than to shake even by the lightest possible touch the splendid monument of love and trust Basil had built up for her with so great a joy and so great a faith.