If she had been of another type he would have saved both her and himself a scene and steered ably through the difficulties of the situation towards a point where they could have met upon a normal plane. A very pretty woman with whose affairs one has nothing whatever to do, and whose pretty home has been the perfection of modern smartness of custom, suddenly opening her front door in the unexplained absence of a footman and confronting a visitor, plainly upon the verge of hysteria, suggests the necessity of promptness. But Feather gave him not a breath’s space. She was in fact not merely on the verge of her hysteria. She had gone farther. And here he was. Oh, here he was! She fell down upon her knees and actually clasped his immaculateness. “Oh, Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe!” She said it three times because he presented to her but the one idea. He did not drag himself away from her embrace but he distinctly removed himself from it. “You must not fall upon your knees, Mrs. Lawless,” he said. “Shall we go into the drawing-room?” “I—was writing to you. I am starving—but it seemed too silly when I wrote it. And it’s true!” Her broken words were as senseless in their sound as she had thought them when she saw them written. “Will you come up into the drawing-room and tell me exactly what you mean,” he said and he made her release him and stand upon her feet. As the years had passed he had detached himself from so many weaknesses and their sequelae of emotion that he had felt himself a safely unreachable person. He was not young and he knew enough of the disagreeableness of consequences to be adroit in keeping out of the way of apparently harmless things which might be annoying. Yet as he followed Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and watched her stumbling up the stairs like a punished child he was aware that he was abnormally in danger of pitying her as he did not wish to pity people. The pity was also something apart from the feeling that it was hideous that a creature so lovely, so shallow and so fragile should have been caught in the great wheels of Life.