For some time he had been doing his best to convince himself that he had not the slightest intention of marrying Belle Yorke. He had grown more and more assured of this; and, naturally, the more confident he became of his resolution to give her up, the more her charm for him increased. He set up the old, old debtor-and-creditor account between prudence and inclination. He did penance for his friendship with Belle Yorke by his flirtation with Lady Victoria Mauleverer, and repaid himself for his attentions to Lord Severn’s daughter with a smile from the singer. To a man in such a state of self-deception Despencer’s poison came as a tonic. His wrath at hearing her attacked, and the necessity he felt of being able to rebut the accusation, were the measure of his love for the woman he had resolved never to love. It was twenty-four hours since the little episode at the Marchioness of Severn’s. Hammond’s blunt contradiction had glided harmless off the imperturbable Despencer, who had murmured some vague apology and made his escape, leaving his sting behind. There was no wisdom in rubbing it in then. It was better to let it rankle during the interval before the concert. It was then that Despencer intended to play out his winning cards. Despencer’s words had been the first intimation to Hammond of the existence of any such ill report. Promptly as he had spurned it, the incident had served to remind him roughly of how little he really knew of this girl who had come to hold such a large place in his life. He had seen much of her in Bohemia, enough for those lookers-on who always see our motives and aims so much more clearly than we do ourselves to write him down her lover. But then no one lives altogether in Bohemia. Even the oldest inhabitants are only migratory; like the swallows, they have their seasons of coming and of flight, and who knows in what strange lands they spend the other periods of their existence! Intimate as they were in that sunlit region, Hammond felt that there were reserves in the singer’s life. One of those reserves was her home, which she had steadily avoided showing him. He knew as little of her private life, indeed, as any stranger in the stalls who heard her sing. He had come away from the house in Berkeley Square resolving to dismiss the slander from his mind. He spent the next night and morning in the vain effort, and in the afternoon he came to Belle Yorke’s house. It was not till he found himself waiting alone in the little parlor, surrounded by the Scriptural prints and parlor games, that Hammond began to ask himself what madness had brought him to such a place with any thought of evil in his heart. He was not left alone for very long. He heard steps outside, and the sound of the door-handle turning in the lock. He rose to his feet, expecting to see Belle Yorke’s mother. Instead there entered a small boy in knickerbockers, apparently about twelve or thirteen years of age.