Before the season was over Cecil and Hector had drifted back into the old companionship. No word had been uttered by the Major to which the most fiery of Hibernian husbands could have taken objection. But the friendship of a man and a woman who have at one period in their lives been something more than friends is very apt to be a dangerous friendship. In this whirlpool of West-end life Cecil had no time for self-examination--even if self-examination were a process to which the human mind is inclined. If she was doing wrong--if she had passed the impalpable boundary-line, she shut her eyes to the fact, and would not remember those hidden dangers towards which she was drifting. If the days on which she met Hector Gordon were very pleasant to her, she beguiled herself with the idea that her pleasure arose from other causes than the soldier's presence. What was he but an element in the crowd? And as a woman is not gifted with the faculty of logic, Cecil did not take the trouble to ask herself why the crowd seemed so dull and vapid without him. She could see Mrs. Lobyer's danger, for that was a peril of a palpable and obvious nature. It is impossible for a young matron to indulge in a chronic flirtation with one of the most eligible single men of the season unnoticed and unslandered. But Flo did not object to being slandered a little. The furtive glances of dowagers and the whispers of faded beauties gave zest to her life. "It's no use talking to me, Cecil," she said when her friend remonstrated with her. "You know that I care about as much for Sir Nugent Evershed as I care for this parasol; but it gives me tone to have him dancing attendance upon me. He brings me people whom Mr. Lobyer's money would never beguile across my threshold; and I should be a lost creature without him." "But if your father were to hear one malicious word about you, Flo----" "My dearest Cecil, that is just the kind of thing one's father never does hear. If I were to commit a murder to-morrow, I should like to know who would tell my father any thing about it. Unless he read the affair in the newspapers, he might go down to his grave in happy ignorance of my iniquity. And after I had been hung, his acquaintance would shake their heads and say, 'That sad attack of bronchitis,--so young--so lovely; but I always told Mrs. Lobyer that the throat was the vulnerable part,--' and so on."