"No," she said. "Don't. She won't understand." She rose. "I am not going to leave it to Mamma." She went to the fire and stirred it to a furious flame. "Grevill will be here," she said, "in half an hour." She walked across the room--I can see her going now--holding her beautiful head high. She locked the door (I was locked in with Antigone). She went to a writing-table where the "Memoirs" lay spread out in parts; she took them and gathered them into a pile. I was standing by the hearth and she came toward me; I can see her; she was splendid, carrying them in her arms sacrificially. And she laid them on the fire. It took us half an hour to burn them. We did it in a sort of sacred silence. When it was all over and I saw her stand there, staring at a bit of Wrackham's handwriting that had resisted to the last the purifying flame, I tried to comfort her. "Angelette," I said, "don't be unhappy. That was the kindest thing you could do--and the best thing, believe me--to your father's memory." "I'm afraid," she said, "I wasn't thinking--altogether--of Papa." I may add that her mother did _not_ understand, and that--when we at last unlocked the door--we had a terrible scene. The dear lady has not yet forgiven Antigone; she detests her son-in-law; and I'm afraid she isn't very fond of me. THE COSMOPOLITAN PART I INLAND I Unspeakable, unlikable, worse than all, unsketchable. A woman has no more formidable rival than her idea in the head of an imaginative young man, and Maurice Durant had been rash enough to fall in love with Miss Tancred before sight. He was rash in everything. When the Colonel asked him down to Coton Manor for a fortnight, he accepted the invitation (with much pleasure) by return, and lay awake half the night with joyous anticipation. He was in the train steaming into the Midlands before he realized that he knew nothing of his host beyond a vague family tradition. He was his (Durant's) godfather; he was a retired Colonel of militia; he had given him (Durant) a hideous silver cup; but this was the first time he had given him an invitation. There was something more, too. Durant had spent the last seven years exploring every country but his own, and he was out of touch with family tradition; but now he thought of it he had--he certainly had--a distinct recollection of hearing his father say that of all his numerous acquaintance that fellow Tancred was quite the most intolerable bore. He had been a little precipitate. Still, he said to himself, England was England, and if there was any fishing on the Colonel's land, or a decent mount in his stables, he thought he could pull through. Mrs. Tancred was dead; he did not certainly know that there was a Miss Tancred, but if there were he meant to flirt with her, and if the worst came to the worst he could always sketch her (the unsketchable!).