stood and would stand the effect on those other lives--effects great or small, transitory or permanent, but in the mass amounting to a considerable sum of human experience, owing its shape and colour in the end to her own action. Though she had not loved Bertie Merriam, their intercourse, his revelation of himself, and the manner of their parting had deeply affected her. For the first time she had seen the enemy, convention--the established order, the proper thing--in a form which she could not only understand, but with which she was obliged to sympathize. What had seemed to her hard dogmatism in her husband and Attlebury, and a mere caste-respectability, external, narrow, and cowardly, in the denizens of Woburn Square, took on a new shape when it was embodied in the loyalty of a soldier and found its expression, not in demands upon another, but in the sacrifice of self to an obligation and an ideal. Liberty had been her god, and she would not desert the shrine at which Shaylor's Patch had taught her to worship; but Merriam had shown her, had brought home to her through the penetrating appeal of vivid emotion, that there were other deities worthy of offerings and noble worshippers who made them. It was a great revulsion of feeling which drove her to declare that Merriam could do no other than sacrifice his hope of her to his sworn service and to the regiment. In justifying, or more than justifying, himself, in some sort Merriam pleaded for Cyril Maxon. Winnie held herself to a stricter account of her dealings with her husband. When she understood why he had deviated from his strict conviction, and how it was likely that the deviation would be in vain, she was anxious to rid her soul of any sense of responsibility. She recalled just what she had said, as near as she could; she listened carefully to Mrs. Lenoir's account of her own conversation with Lady Rosaline. "Do you think that we influenced her--that we stopped her?" she asked. "Because I wouldn't have done that on purpose." "I certainly wouldn't have encouraged her on purpose. And, if you ask me, I think that our attitude of--well, of reserve (Mrs. Lenoir was smiling) will have its weight--combined, perhaps, with Sir Axel's attractions." "I'm sorry. If Cyril does want her, and it doesn't come off, he'll hate me worse than ever." "He won't guess you've had anything to do with it--supposing you have." "No, but he'll trace the whole thing back to me, of course. He'll blame me for having forced him into acting against his conscience." "Tut, tut, he shouldn't have such a silly conscience," said Mrs. Lenoir easily. To her, consciences were not things to be treated with an exaggerated punctilio. "After all, if she'd asked you right out, what would you have said?" "I should have refused to say anything, of course."