De Grost and his wife were dining together at the corner table in a fashionable but somewhat Bohemian restaurant. Both had been in the humour for reminiscences, and they had outstayed most of their neighbours. "I wonder what people really think of us," Violet remarked pensively. "I told Lady Amershal, when she asked us to go there this evening, that we always dined together alone somewhere once a week, and she absolutely refused to believe me. 'With your own husband, my dear?' she kept on repeating." "Her ladyship's tastes are more catholic," the baron declared dryly. "Yet, after all, Violet, the real philosophy of married life demands something of this sort." Violet smiled and fingered her pearls for a minute. "What the real philosophy of married life may be I do not know," she said, "but I am perfectly content with our rendering of it. What a fortunate thing, Peter, with your intensely practical turn of mind, that Nature endowed you with so much sentiment." De Grost gazed reflectively at the cigarette which he had just selected from his case. "Well," he remarked, "there have been times when I have cursed myself for a fool, but, on the whole, sentiment keeps many fires burning." She leaned towards him and dropped her voice a little. "Tell me," she begged, "do you ever think of the years we spent together in the country? Do you ever regret?" He smiled thoughtfully. "It is a hard question, that," he admitted. "There were days there which I loved, but there were days, too, when the restlessness came--days when I longed to hear the hum of the city and to hear men speak whose words were of life and death and the great passions. I am not sure, Violet, whether, after all, it is well for one who has lived to withdraw absolutely from the thrill of life." She laughed softly but gaily. "I am with you," she declared, "absolutely. I think that the fairies must have poured into my blood the joy of living for its own sake. I should be an ungrateful woman indeed if I found anything to complain of nowadays. Yet there is one thing that sometimes troubles me," she went on, after a moment's pause. "And that?" he asked. "The danger," she said slowly. "I do not want to lose you, Peter. There are times when I am afraid." De Grost flicked the ash from his cigarette. "The days are passing," he remarked, "when men point revolvers at one another, and hire assassins to gain their ends. Now it is more a battle of wits. We play chess on the board of life still, but we play with ivory pieces instead of steel and poison. Our brains direct, and not our muscles." She sighed. "It is only the one man of whom I am afraid," she said. "You have outwitted him so often and he does not forgive." De Grost smiled. It was an immense compliment, this. "Bernadine," he murmured softly, "otherwise our friend, the Count von Hern."