"That is very wrong of you, and cowardly." She was quite fearless. "You should never give up a fight or remain passive when what really belongs to you is being filched from you. If you do, as a band, you deserve to be put aside. You should fight with the same fierceness with which those Radicals do who know they are shams, but are indeed in earnest to obtain their own ends." "You are quite right. There are some women who stimulate in all ways, who are, as it were, sent into the world as electric dynamos. They get the best out of everyone; they make men work better and play better--and love better." He looked at her now with his fine eyes sparkling, but flirtation was far beneath his feet. To his mistresses he was a master, a generous, tolerant, contemptuous master; to his friends like Lady Garribardine the essence of courtly consideration; to the general company politely aloof. But to the woman who could arouse his love, what might he not be! Katherine thought this, and a quiver ran through her of a kind she had never experienced before, so that her composure was not so perfect as usual when she answered: "If one really knew exactly what is love!" "You have no dim guess at it, then?" He was quite surprised that it should interest him to know what her reply would be. "Yes, I have--more than that. I know that some phases of it make one feel mad, agitated, unbalanced, animal, even motherly and protective--but what it could be if it touched the soul, I cannot fathom." The Duke did not speak for a moment; he was filled with wonder and a growing admiration, admiration which extended even beyond the very real appreciation of her beauty. Her mentality was so far above the average, her directness so interesting. There was not the slightest trace of pose in anything she said--And that last speech--what possibilities it opened up! She knew something of one side of love then, evidently! "Do you realise what your words imply?" "Yes." "That you have loved someone--in that way--once?" "Yes, I have--It is a way that frightens one, and makes one more than ever sure that there must be something else. Do you know that there is--you who have lived your life?" Her face was pale and cool as moonbeams. She seemed to be talking in the abstract, for all the personal question. The Duke found himself quite unaccountably moved, and was just about to answer eagerly, when at that moment the host joined them from the other drawing-room; the rubber was over, and he felt he must do his duty and not make too obvious a point of leaving the pair alone. "Come and see the miniatures, Mordryn," he said. "We must not forget that it was their lure which brought you here to-night." His tone Katherine well understood, it contained for all its surface graciousness some bitterness underneath.