He was indeed painting Rose Temple’s portrait, for he was already a notable portrait painter, but he was doing it much as Raphael may have painted the Sistine Madonna, with a reverence which was full of ineffable tenderness and inspiration, and he was too keenly aware of Fox’s intimate knowledge of him and his unmerciful insight into human motives to endure the thought of Fox in possession of his inmost secrets and on terms of friendship with Rose. Fox! one of the most enigmatical, the most dangerous, the most fascinating personalities--Allestree had seen the potency of that spell--to be brought in contact with any woman, and most of all with a young and imaginative girl. After a moment Fox’s laugh interrupted him. “My dear Allestree,” he said provokingly, “why not paint the Angel Gabriel?” His companion, whose sensitiveness amounted to an exquisite self-torture, bit his lip and made no reply. At the door of the club they both paused as Allestree prepared to take a car uptown while his cousin went in to dine. “Sorry you can’t come to us,” he said, in a tone which was a shade less cordial than usual; “mother will be disappointed; there is no one else coming, and she always counts greatly on a talk with you.” “Give her my love instead,” Fox retorted, with easy kindness, “I’m sorry, but I dine here and then go up to the Whites’. I promised; there’s to be music--or something--to-night.” Allestree slightly shrugged his shoulders. “So I supposed,” he said dryly, and signalled his car. II A FEW hours later William Fox presented himself at the home of the new Cabinet minister. He was an intimate habitué of the house; a fact which created no little comment in social and political circles, for Fox and White were naturally almost antipodal personalities and had often engaged in political controversies, which had inevitably ended in White’s defeat at the hands of his daring and brilliant adversary. But it was not their antipathies or their rivalries in politics which aroused the gossip, of which Fox was vaguely and carelessly aware, but the presupposed existence of an old sentimental relation between him and White’s wife. However, gossip of all kinds troubled Fox but little, and he followed his own inclinations with the indolent egoism of a man who has been for many years the spoiled darling of fortune.