As for Alice herself, she slept peacefully also, the doubt which poor Jack's pain had raised in her gentle mind having been allayed by his prompt submission. And Jack snored--positively snored; for he was rather fatigued with his own excitement, being of the sort which takes most things not so much keenly as heavily. To tell the truth, also, his determination to marry his cousin was so fixed that the greater part of his pain had been sheer inability to grasp the idea of denial; so that he reverted gladly to the old position without asking questions as a less tenacious man might have done. CHAPTER VII. Lord George Temple sate moodily in the armchair of his study in his little house in Mayfair chewing the end of a cigar and looking disconsolately at a tray of whiskey and water and a plate of oval thin Captain's biscuits on the table. He was a red-haired smooth-faced man with rather a long upper lip, and a good-natured, somewhat whimsical expression. "It is a confounded shame!" he said to his wife, who, with an opera cloak slipping from her pretty bare shoulders, was resting for a moment before going upstairs to bed. "Graham gives his cook twenty-five pounds a year--I heard her telling you so one day when she was wanting a new one--and yet there wasn't a thing fit to eat on the table----" "Well, I don't know," put in Lady George, absently; "I think those stuffed larks came from Mirobolants. I saw that style of decoration in his place the other day, and I'm quite sure the iced soufflé was Bombardi's; I know the shape." "Exactly what I said!" continued the husband, "not a thing fit for a gouty man to eat at the table, and yet a woman on twenty-five pounds ought to be up to roast chicken and a rice pudding." Blanche Temple looked at her spouse with the compassionate air of tolerance which she invariably extended to his views. "But you can't give your friends roast chicken and rice pudding; you can't, indeed, nowadays. People wouldn't come." "My dear girl," interrupted Lord George, obstinately, "there were four men at the table who, like myself, partook of soup, fish, and cheese straws. And one poor beggar didn't even have the soup." The thought was apparently comforting, for he began more contentedly on a biscuit. But his wife was now interested in the subject. Most things interested her, either to affirmation or denial, for Paul Macleod's sister was a very clever woman, if at the same time curiously conventional. "Well! I don't know who eats the things, then," she said, aggrievedly. "Why, the last time we had a dinner-party--I mean when the Woodwards were here--I'm sure Paul ought to be infinitely obliged to me for the trouble I take--the cook who came in used pounds on pounds of stock meat, and quarts on quarts of cream; to say nothing of a whole bottle of whiskey. 'You had better give it her, my lady,' said Jane, 'for fear as the dinner might 'ave no appearance.'"