The others tore through their dressing. Miss Walsh wanted to retire to Madame's sitting-room, there to have a soul-satisfying "mourn" with Madame over the departure of Gustave, and to pick out of Madame's stream of reminiscences a pearl or so to remember of the boyhood of that excellent nephew. Little Olwen, who had overheard Mr. Brown saying, "Look here, Ross, none of your shoving me out of my place at table--even if I do sleep out, there's no reason why I should be made to sit with the back of my head towards everybody I want to look at, dashed if there is," was eager to run down to the _salle_, and with a glance or a greeting make an excuse for the right young man to be sitting facing her. Only Mrs. Cartwright took her time and was rather late for dinner. As she redressed her hair, still damp from her bathe, and slipped into her tawny-golden tea-gown, the writer's face was intent. She was thinking, thinking hard. Even in moving about her room she kept glancing at a couple of pig-skin bags stowed into a corner. One of them bore the name of Captain Keith Cartwright, and of his regiment; what service it had seen since it had first gone out with them to India. She knew what she ought to be doing with those bags at this moment. Packing them up, to go. Yes, she ought to be folding her skirts and wrapping up her boots and shoes and sorting her manuscripts. One word to Madame, and a _fiacre_ could be obtained that same evening to take the bags, and herself with them, to the hotel at the Ville d'Hiver, where she had already spent a night on her way here. There she could stay until her passport was made out for England, and then she could go back to her rooms in town, back to be near her boys at school, and right away from this place of conflict and too sweet disturbance--away from Jack Awdas, who wanted to say something to her after dinner. She knew well what it was. Ever since that moonlight walk he had been besieging her--not with words again, but with every glance of his blue eyes, every turn of his head towards her, every husky, beseeching note of his voice. Now for a third time he was going to put it into words. She did not know how to check him. It was because she wished--she so wished that she need not. Again and again already, by night, when she was tossing sleeplessly, by day, when she was talking of other things, she had gone over the question. Marriage----with that boy. He was not the first, he would not be the last who had adored a woman old enough to be his mother. And she herself was not the first woman who, past what is considered the age for Love, had received, offered to her as a bouquet, the gathered share of love that could have sufficed a score of young girls. Had this been always a wrong and an unlovely thing? * * * * *