"Oh, yes; fourteen of them, if necessary," he returned sarcastically. "But I don't want them, really. I should feel horribly embarrassed with them." "Oh, you would get over that!" she answered easily. "You mustn't think so much of yourself." He got up and passed round to the back of her chair and laid his two hands on her shoulders. "You scheming little fiend!" he said. "You have had this in your mind all along when you have asked me repeatedly to come down." "I have always wanted you to marry," she allowed, smiling up at him. "You will make a delightful husband." "Well, I'm not going to marry," he said. "If you air any more of your matrimonial plans, I'll make love to you. I'll wreck your home." "You couldn't," she said. "Dickie would never trouble to be jealous of any one." She put up her two hands and laid them upon his where they rested upon her shoulders. "You will be nice to her, George, won't you?" she said. "You'll like her immensely, if only you let yourself." "Of course I shall," he replied, and smiled grimly. "I like every Eve's daughter of you, worse luck!" CHAPTER NINE. Change in a person's appearance when it is due to mental conditions varies according to mood and outside influences. When Dare was face to face with Pamela Arnott he decided that Mrs Carruthers had exaggerated the want of look about which she had written: there was nothing to excite sympathy, or even comment, in the faintly flushed, pleasantly excited face which turned eagerly to greet him, as, on entering the Carruthers' drawing-room, Pamela's eyes singled him out with a smiling welcome in their blue depths. When he had talked with her a little while he did notice that she looked older; the girlishness, with its expression of frank gaiety, had faded during the past eighteen months. There was a more perceptible change he considered in Arnott himself. The man had coarsened, in manner as much as appearance. He was more noisy and assertive, and inclined to be offhand when addressing his wife. Dare hated him for that,--hated him for his lack of courtesy, and the absence of those small but significant attentions which had formerly been so noticeable in his bearing towards her. He seldom looked at her now, never with the old tender, almost absurdly chivalrous regard which one associates more with the lover than with the husband of some years' standing. Dare decided that he had put off the lover finally; that was about what it amounted to. But that, after all, cannot be reckoned a calamity: men do not remain always obviously their wives' lovers. "So glad to see you again," murmured Pamela, and her smile seemed to demand that he should recall the length of the friendship he had once insisted upon, with its consequent intimacy. "I began to think you were becoming a mere memory." "So long as you didn't forget altogether!" he said, and looked earnestly into her eyes. "But I didn't think you would."