The years had changed her greatly. Her dazzling beauty had not so much faded as hardened. Her eyes were still bright, her hair gold; but the flush of red-and-white was all art now; her mouth had tightened; the brightness of her blue eyes was that of aching restlessness. She had tried rest cures and come away half maddened by the quiet, by her leisure to think. She had travelled and come home to England because the boy was there. Sometimes she would turn to Bertie, show the same half-wild outbursts of tenderness which she had first shown on the day she had sold the pendant; trying to find comfort in his caresses, clinging to him, pouring out tender words. Then the phase would pass. Without perfect confidence perfect love cannot exist. There was a secret between them; they were lovers no longer. For weeks she would go her own careless way, spending recklessly, always in debt, paying off the mites on account which make debts rolling snowballs, mounting until they crush the maker. Sometimes Denise was difficult to get at; sometimes she said she was afraid of Sir Cyril. The boy's price came in small sums, fifties, twenties; often frittered away on a day or two's foolish amusement. Old Hugh Carteret made his will, left it ready for signature. "When you have a child, Bertie, I will leave you everything," he said, "and make your allowance up to what my boys had." He sighed as he spoke of his loss. Esmé would have welcomed a child now--a mite to wipe out Cyril's memory, but none came to her. She had taken to concealing her debts, to paying them as well as she could, for Bertie grew sterner as the years passed. "I believe that Reynolds girl advises him," Esmé once confided to Dollie Gresham. "They're always talking sense." "So frightfully trying," sympathized Dollie kindly; "kind of thing one learns up for maiden aunts, or uncles about to die; but in everyday life, unbearable." Esmé's old friends dropped her a little; she lost her fresh, childish charm; she was always hinting at her poverty; asking carelessly to be driven about in other people's cars, picking up bundles of flowers and carrying them off, vaguely promising to send the money for them; but she hadn't time to go round to get her own. She wanted now to be entertained rather than entertain. She was feverishly anxious to win at bridge, and irritable to her partner if they lost. The club saw more of her. Men friends dropped Esmé after a time; the disinterested spending of money is not the way of ordinary mankind. Dinners, suppers, flowers, theatres must have their credit account on one side of the ledger; and Esmé would have none of it. Behind the aching love for her lost boy she liked her husband, and even if she had not liked him, would not have deceived him. Stolen interviews, bribed maids, carefully-arranged country-house visits, were not of her life.