“I’ve had a headache for three days,” he answered, “and I feel hot and cross. I don’t care about a lot of things you say, Feather.” “Don’t be silly,” she retorted. “I don’t care about a lot of things you say—and do, too, for the matter of that.” Robert Gareth-Lawless who was sitting on a chair in her dressing-room grunted slightly as he rubbed his red and flushed forehead. “There’s a—sort of limit,” he commented. He hesitated a little before he added sulkily “—to the things one—_says_.” “That sounds like Alice,” was her undisturbed answer. “She used to squabble at me because I _said_ things. But I believe one of the reasons people like me is because I make them laugh by _saying_ things. Lord Coombe laughs. He is a very good person to know,” she added practically. “Somehow he _counts_. Don’t you recollect how before we knew him—when he was abroad so long—people used to bring him into their talk as if they couldn’t help remembering him and what he was like. I knew quite a lot about him—about his cleverness and his manners and his way of keeping women off without being rude—and the things he says about royalties and the aristocracy going out of fashion. And about his clothes. I adore his clothes. And I’m convinced he adores mine.” She had in fact at once observed his clothes as he had crossed the grass to her seat under the copper beech. She had seen that his fine thinness was inimitably fitted and presented itself to the eye as that final note of perfect line which ignores any possibility of comment. He did not wear things—they were expressions of his mental subtleties. Feather on her part knew that she wore her clothes—carried them about with her—however beautifully. “I like him,” she went on. “I don’t know anything about political parties and the state of Europe so I don’t understand the things he says which people think are so brilliant, but I like him. He isn’t really as old as I thought he was the first day I saw him. He had a haggard look about his mouth and eyes then. He looked as if a spangled pink and blue gauze soul with little floating streamers was a relief to him.” The child Robin was a year old by that time and staggered about uncertainly in the dingy little Day Nursery in which she passed her existence except on such occasions as her nurse—who had promptly fallen in love with the smart young footman—carried her down to the kitchen and Servants’ Hall in the basement where there was an earthy smell and an abundance of cockroaches. The Servants’ Hall had been given that name in the catalogue of the fashionable agents who let the home and it was as cramped and grimy as the two top-floor nurseries. The next afternoon Robert Gareth-Lawless staggered into his wife’s drawing-room and dropped on to a sofa staring at her and breathing hard. “Feather!” he gasped. “Don’t know what’s up with me. I believe I’m—awfully ill! I can’t see straight. Can’t think.”