"If you gave me the key to your material Shadow Land, it would not be playing the game?" "You are right, my dear," said he. "It wouldn't." "I thought as much," said Lady Auriol. He rose, mechanically adjusted his jacket, which always went awry on his gaunt frame. "I want to say something," he declared abruptly. "You're the only lady--highly-bred woman--with whom I've been on terms of friendship in my life. It has been an experience far more wonderful than you can possibly realize. I'll keep it as an imperishable memory"--he spoke bolt upright as though he were addressing troops on parade before a battle--"it's right that you should know I'm not ungrateful for all you have done for me. I've only one ambition left--that you should remember me as a soldier--and--in my own way--a gentleman." "A very gallant gentleman," she said with quivering lips. He held out his hand, took hers, kissed it French fashion. "Good-bye and God bless you," said he, and marched out of the room. She stood for a while, with her hand on her heart--suffering a pain that was almost physical. Then she rushed to the door and cried in a loud voice over the balustrade of the landing: "Andrew, come back." But the slam of the front door drowned her call. She returned to the drawing-room and threw up the window. Andrew was already far away, tearing down the rainswept street. Now, if Andrew had heard the cry, he would have heard that in it which no man can hear unmoved. He would have leaped up the stairs and there would have been as pretty a little scene of mutual avowals as you could wish for. Auriol knew it. She has frankly told me so. Not until this last interview was she certain of his love. But then, although he said nothing, any fool of a woman could have seen it as clear as daylight. And she had been planted there like a stuck pig all the time--her _ipsissima verba_ (O Diana distinction of lover's fancy!) and when common sense came to her aid, she just missed him by the fraction of a second.... Yet, after all, my modern Diana--or Andrew's, if you prefer it--had her own modern mode of telling an elderly outsider about her love affairs--the mode of the subaltern from whom is dragged the story of his Victoria Cross. Andrew Lackaday's quaintly formulated idealizations had their foundations in fact. This is by the way. What happened next was Lady Auriol's recovery of real common sense when she withdrew her head and her rained-upon hat from the window and drew down the sash. She flew to her bedroom, stamped about with clenched fists until she had dried up at their source the un-Auriol like tears that threatened to burst forth. Her fury at her weakness spent, she felt better and strangled the temptation to write him then and there a summons to return that evening for a full explanation. My God! Hadn't they had their explanation? If he could in honour have said, "I am a free live man as you are a free live woman, and I love you as you love me"--wouldn't