"Rob always said that if a woman who was pretty could see a man often enough--again and again--he couldn't _help_ himself--unless there _was_ some one else!" Her last words were fiercely accusing. She quite glared at him a few seconds, her chest heaving pantingly. She suddenly sprang from her sofa and dashed towards a table where a pile of photographs lay in an untidy little heap. She threw them about with angrily shaking hands until at last she caught at one and brought it back to him. "There _was_ some one else," she laughed shrilly. "You were in love with that creature." It was one of the photographs of Alixe such as the Bond Street shop had shown in its windows. She made a movement as if to throw it into the grate and he took it from her hand, saying nothing whatever. "I'd forgotten about it until Owen Delamore reminded me only yesterday," she said. "He's a romantic thing and he heard that you had been in attendance and had been sent to their castle in Germany. He worked the thing out in his own way. He said you had chosen me because I was like her. I can see now! I _was_ like her!" "If you had been like her," his voice was intensely bitter, "I should have asked you to be my wife. You are as unlike her as one human being can be to another." "But I was enough like her to make you take me up!" she cried furiously. "I have neither taken you up nor put you down," he answered. "Be good enough never to refer to the subject again." "I'll refer to any subject I like. If you think I shall not you are mistaken. It will be worth talking about. An Early Victorian romance is worth something in these days." The trend of her new circle had indeed carried her far. He was privately appalled by her. She was hysterically, passionately spiteful--almost to the point of malignance. "Do you realise that this is a scene? It has not been our habit to indulge in scenes," he said. "I shall speak about it as freely as I shall speak about Robin," she flaunted at him, wholly unrestrained. "Do you think I know nothing about Robin? I'm an affectionate mother and I've been making inquiries. She's not with the Dowager at Eaton Square. She got ill and was sent away to be hidden in the country. Girls are, sometimes. I thought she would be sent away somewhere, the day I met her in the street. She looked exactly like that sort of thing. Where is she? I demand to know." There is nothing so dangerous to others as the mere spitefully malignant temper of an empty headed creature giving itself up to its own weak fury. It knows no restraint, no limit in its folly. In her fantastic broodings over her daughter's undue exaltation of position Feather had many times invented for her own entertainment little scenes in which she could score satisfactorily. Such scenes had always included Coombe, the Dowager, Robin and Mrs. Muir.