To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness. No trait was, in fact, further from his character. Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's face. He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all. But when pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly. Ten seconds he had suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time. Nor was proximity at all essential. He could not recall, he admitted modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a hundred yards. But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile. In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to adorations even at half a mile. Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully, she was so perfectly his conception of a type. He conceived a good deal in types, and preferred the typical even to the length of its deficiencies. Deficiency did indeed play a part in Laura Marten's attractions, since the broad mouth, the long eyes, and the drowsy luxuriance of her figure were without everything that could make them harmless. She came under the superbs in Caragh's catalogue, and to the superb he was almost a stranger. That, perhaps, speeded his intimacy. "You can take it for granted that I think you magnificent," he said at their first meeting. This was their last. It epitomized sufficiently what had happened in the interval. Some of it might be accounted for by his having told her that the next interval was for ever. The occasion was a dance at a big house in Grosvenor Square. It was Caragh's last appearance as a bachelor in town, since he started on the morrow for a trip which the owners of a new Atlantic liner were taking in her round the Isles. He was to be dropped at Ballindra, where his marriage, for recent family reasons, was after all to take place. He was seated on a lounge in a blind passage near the top of the house, and, though still early in the evening, he had been sitting there for some time. He knew the house more intimately than most of those who were seeking for such seats, and this one was left to him and his partner entirely undisturbed. The music floated up the stairs with varying distinctness, as the dancers choked the entrances to the great gallery below. He was leaning back, with his arms half folded and a hand upon his mouth, looking straight before him.