A wild fancy had seized her. It had grown into an irrepressible desire. Her woman’s wit had worked swiftly. The lie had mounted to her lips on wings of triumph, and spread radiance over her face. No wonder Gleam was enraptured. Women who are in the habit of throwing their caps over windmills find it as monotonous as anything else after a time; but for one who has never done it before, the act is accompanied with a rare exhilaration. Lady Phayre had lived a bright but perfectly exemplary life. No breath of scandal had ever rested upon her name. Sir Ephraim had cloyed her with affection, and hitherto she had regarded amatory offerings with a young confectioner’s serene indifference to puffs. If she dared now and then to flout at convention, she was only exercising the privileges of her position. No one could find a word to say against it. To have driven to a politician’s house at night to deliver a political message was a commonplace of propriety. But to take the message of victory to the man she loved, knowing, with a thrill that quivered from her feet to her hair, that the message would contain also the openly avowed gift of herself--that set matters on a totally different plane. It was wild, daring, unutterably sweet. The breathless moment that followed the lie was the supreme point of happiness in Lady Phayre’s life. She went to a writing-table, took a sheet of the crested, delicately-scented paper, and wrote a hurried line, which she enclosed in an envelope and thrust in her corsage. Then she rang for her maid, and in a few moments was speeding across London in a hansom cab. The cold air caught her face, filling her with a joyous sense of vitality. She pictured, glowingly, the little scene that would take place. First, his look of wondering delight at her presence, then the illumination on his face when she gave him her breathless message. There would be just time to deliver it, if he was to catch the midnight train. The letter she would slip into the letter-box. It would be found after she had left. If it was forwarded to him the next day, so much the better. She loved him. It was a new, wild sensation to her. The gradual drifting towards the rapids had been pleasant, though not unaccompanied by certain trepidations and misgivings. This evening had brought her to the edge, and the swirl fascinated her. For once Lady Phayre had lost her head. And yet there was method in her wildness. She felt herself worshipped, longed for, saw the man standing in passionate helplessness on the other side of the social gap between them. It was her prerogative to stretch the bridge across. In the midst of all the excitement, Lady Phayre was deliciously conscious that she was doing it gracefully.