‘Yes, I must have been,’ she replied tranquilly. ‘You see I work pretty hard, and nature is good enough to give me rest when I need it. You work hard too, Will, but in quite another way—you toil after amusement. Now that’s the hardest form of labour I know! Treadmills are nothing to it! No wonder you’re tired! Breakfast’s ready; let us go and have it; I’ve been out riding for an hour this morning, and I feel desperately hungry. Come along!’ She led the way downstairs; he followed slowly and with a vague feeling of uneasiness. He missed something in his wife’s manner—an indefinable something which he could not express—something that had always characterised her, but which now had unaccountably disappeared. It was as if a wide river had suddenly rolled in between them, forcing her to stand on one side of the flood and he on the other. He studied her observantly from under his fine eyelash growth, as she made the tea and with a few quick touches here and there altered the decorous formality of the breakfast-table into the similitude of an Arcadian feast of beauty by the mere artistic placing of a vase of flowers or a dish of fruit, and this done, handed him the morning’s newspaper with smiling and courteous punctilio. ‘Spartan seems to be turning crusty,’ he remarked as he unfolded the journal. ‘Last night, when I knocked at your door, he showed his teeth and growled at me. I didn’t know he had such an uncertain temper.’ Delicia looked round at her canine friend with a pretty air of remonstrance. ‘Oh, Spartan! What is this I hear?’ she said, whereat Spartan hung his head and tucked his tail well under his haunches. ‘Don’t you know your master when he comes home late? Did you take him for a regular “rake,” Spartan? Did you think he had been in bad company? Fie, for shame! You ought to know better, naughty boy!’ Spartan looked abashed, but not so abashed as did Lord Carlyon. He fidgeted on his chair, got red in the face, and made a great noise in folding and unfolding the newspaper; and presently, finding his own thoughts too much for him, he began to get angry with nobody in particular, and, as is the fashion with egotistical men, turned a sudden unprovoked battery of assault on the woman he was hourly and daily wronging. ‘I heard something last night that displeased me very much, Delicia,’ he said, affecting a high moral tone. ‘It concerns you, and I should like to speak to you about it.’ ‘Yes?’ said Delicia, with the very slightest lifting of her delicate eyebrows. ‘Yes.’ And Lord Carlyon hummed and hawed for a couple of dubious seconds. ‘You see, you are a woman, and you ought to be very careful what you write. A man told me that in your last book there were some very strong passages,—really strong—you know what I mean—and he said that it is very questionable whether any woman with a proper sense of delicacy ought to write in such a manner.’ Delicia looked at him steadily.