With lips severely placid, felt the knot Climb in her throat, and with her foot unseen, Crushed the wild passion out against the floor, Beneath the banquet, where the meats become As wormwood-- and uttered not a word. Yet there was nothing in Colonel Colquhoun's manner, nothing in his treatment of her, in the least objectionable; what she suffered from was simply contact with an inferior moral body, and the intellectual starvation inevitable in constant association with a mind too shallow to contain any sort of mental sustenance for the sharing. The pleasing fact that he and Evadne were getting on very well together dawned on him quite suddenly one day; but it was she who perceived that the absence of friction was entirely due to the restriction which polite society imposes upon the manners of a gentleman and lady in ordinary everyday intercourse when their bond is not the bond of man and wife. "I should say we are very good friends, Evadne, shouldn't you?" he remarked, in a cheerful tone. "Yes," she responded cordially. They were both in evening dress when this occurred--she sitting beside a table with one bare arm resting upon it, toying with the tassel of her fan; he standing with his back to the fireplace, looking down upon her. It was after dinner, and they were lingering over their coffee until it should be time to stroll in for an hour or so to the opera. "By-the-way," he said after a pause, "have you read any of those books I got for you--any of the French ones?" Her face set somewhat, but she looked up at him, and answered without hesitation: "Yes. I have read the 'Nana,' 'La Terre,' 'Madame Bovary,' and 'Sapho.'" She stopped there, and he then waited in vain for her to express an opinion. "Well," he said at last, "what has struck you most in them?" "The suffering, George," she exclaimed--"_the awful, needless suffering!_" It was a veritable cry of anguish, and as she spoke, she threw her arms forward upon the table beside which she was sitting, laid her face down on them, and burst into passionate sobs. Colonel Colquhoun bit his lip. He had not meant to hurt the girl--in that way, at all events. He took a step toward her, hesitated, not knowing quite what to do; and finally left the room. When next Evadne went to her bookshelves she discovered a great gap. The whole of those dangerous works of fiction had disappeared. CHAPTER XII.