"One can imagine the shock Ellerslie's vanity will encounter when he learns of that canard! Such things require so much explanation, too! I am really sorry, dear, at your humiliating predicament. And what in the name of Venus are you going to say in conciliation to Kenneth Douglass?" Grace flinched pitifully at this double _touche_ of her adversary's keen weapon, but her eyes glinted like burnished steel. The duel was to be _a l'outrance_ now, and she put all her indignation and subtlety behind her blow. The older woman had noted with a malicious pleasure a dull flushing of the fair face and throat but had wrongly ascribed its cause. The battle ground was her bedchamber, and over on a chair, carelessly thrown, lay a man's light topcoat and a pair of gloves many sizes too large for Constance's dainty hands! With a world of scornful meaning the girl looked at the chair, and the eyes of the woman following the direction of that glance, grew black with confusion. "I think he has been sufficiently appealed to in the name of your patron goddess," she said, icily, "and as for Lord Ellerslie, I rejected his proposal even before I had learned of his relations with the author of that despicable lie. As for Mr. Douglass--" The words died on her tongue as the door, evidently communicating with another room adjoining, suddenly opened and a well-known voice said familiarly: "Did I leave my coat and gloves in here last night, Connie? There would be the devil to pay if the chambermaid--!" Standing there in his shirt sleeves, Ken Douglass was, for the first time in his reckless life, at a disadvantage too great for even his conceded adroitness to overcome. In a coma of stupefaction, with horror and shame written all over his gray-white face, he stood staring at the pale, haughty face so relentlessly directed toward him. For a full minute she held him on the rack of her scorn; then with a hard composure in her voice, which accorded but poorly with the unutterable loathing and aversion in her eyes, she said coldly: "I am doubly fortunate in this rencounter. It saves much unnecessary waste of time, and fatigue, and verbiage to find you here! In justice to us both I have come all the way from Europe to tell you that my reported engagement to Lord Ellerslie was a cruel lie!" And without another word she swept proudly out of the room without deigning one look at the woman cowering on the cushioned divan. "Take me home, Bobbie!" she sobbed piteously to her brother, as she clung forsakenly to him in their sitting-room. And further explanation she would vouch him none, despite his bewildered implorations. "Take me home; I want Mummy!"