He should not, if she could help it, have to rue the day when he had allowed the human interest to come into his life, and occupy even a portion of his mental foreground. That was all he had done; he had never flirted with her, Egidia felt sure. “Love plays the deuce with landscape!” he had once laughingly proclaimed, to excuse himself from marrying. No, he should not be forced, by the stain of the courts, the horrors of imputation, to take on himself the shackles of the marriage tie, with which the little woman who had played the part of his evil genius, would so carelessly invest him! * * * * * “She kissed me, but all the while, she would like to scratch my eyes out,” Mrs. Elles in the silence of the spare room was saying to herself. She was not spiteful--oh no, that was not her character at all--but she had studied and could not help knowing human nature! There was no misprision of motive in her mind; she was perfectly aware of Egidia’s reasons for being kind to her. That lady had taken her rival to stay with her because, as the saying is, she preferred to see mischief in front of her--she would keep her safe under her own roof the better to control her. It was all for the man’s sake, not for the woman’s at all! The welfare of Edmund Rivers was the object of Phœbe Elles too, she must not forget that, and she must consent, for his sake, to be the creature of his cousin’s bounty. It must be so, but it was very hard. Egidia, perhaps unconsciously, assumed proprietary airs. Her visitor stamped a little modest stamp of the foot at the thought, and was assailed by a wild desire to prove to Egidia and the world the genuineness of Rivers’ love, by purposely losing her case, and letting him marry her! But would that prove it? * * * * * “Les hommes sont la cause que les femmes ne s’aiment pas!” Mrs. Elles murmured to herself, as arrayed in her prettiest dress, and conscious that she became it, she went to dinner, in the big public room of the Mansions, where Egidia mustered all her famous little parties of twelve.