"Now sit down, Jack," she said, "and tell me all that happened. All I know is that Lady Ardingly brought Maud back before lunch to-day. You may imagine what a relief that was! Andrew had gone up to town early--earlier than you--and he knows nothing about anything. How clever Lady Ardingly is, and how well she has managed everything! Maud, of course, was quite impossible. She would not say a word to me, and stopped down there. But I passed Anthony as I drove up. I said Maud would be charmed to see him. I think things are going all right there, and so Marie's little scheme was not successful." "We will not speak of Marie's little scheme," said Jack. She looked at him in surprise, too absorbed at present in her own thick relief of mind to be annoyed. "How gloomy you are, Jack! I suppose Marie has put you in a bad temper. Did she give it you hot? Poor old man! tell me what she said." "She said--eventually that is--that she was going to do nothing; that she would continue to live with me, and that I might go my own way and do exactly what I liked." Mildred was rapidly stripping off her long suède gloves. "Now, that is nicer than I expected of her," she said. "Of course one could have objected to nothing, to no condition she chose to impose, for we were absolutely in her power, and she might have bound you never to see me again. Do you think perhaps she has something up her sleeve on her own account?" Jack leaned back in his chair. "What do you mean exactly?" he asked. "Dear Jack, how dull you are! Why, Jim Spencer of course. Has she come round to this policy of mutual tolerance? It is quite the best policy. Honesty is not in it!" "No," said he. "I feel sure she has not." Mildred laughed, and poured herself out some tea. "You think not? You don't half appreciate Marie. Nor did I till to-day. But I think she has got twice as much ordinary work-a-day common-sense as we supposed." She bit a macaroon with her short sharp teeth and crunched it. "It was sensible, very sensible, of her not to make a row of European dimensions," she continued. "No doubt when it came to, she saw how impossible it was. But to make no conditions--it was charming, simply charming of her! And how much more comfortable we shall be now, Jack! Before there was always that one little reservation: 'What if Marie knew?' That is gone now. Why didn't we let her know, oh, ages ago? It would have saved so much trouble." She laid her finger-tips lightly on Jack's neck as she passed. He moved his head away. But she did not notice it, and passed on to her table. "This is the photograph of her which you smashed up after the Silly Billy scandal," she said. "Have they not mended the frame well? I told them to send the bill to you. Will you dine here to-night?" "No, I am dining at home," said Jack. Mildred paused. "Ah, you have people, I suppose," she said. "No, we are dining alone, Marie and I. I have got things I must say to her." "Indeed! I cannot guess what."