"You came home early?" he asked indifferently, and she said "Yes," trying to force herself to make some matter-of-fact allusion to the friend in the study, but not succeeding till next day, when her easy observation, "Were you alone when I came in last night?" produced the unembarrassed reply, "No; a secretary was with me. I had rather a heavy night." "So had I," she thought with growing bitterness. But afterwards she stooped to a thing that lowered her in her own sight, while something stronger than herself drove her to do it. "By the way, I thought I heard voices in the study when I came home last night," she said carelessly to the parlourmaid. "Did anyone call while I was out?" "No, ma'am," with some hesitation. "At least--only the--the young lady." "The _young lady_, Rushton? What young lady?" sharply. "Please, m'm, the young lady that comes for master. I never can remember her name. She came last time you went to Onslow Gardens, and when you were ill--and----" "Of course, Rushton, of course--" she interrupted, the blood throbbing in her temples and a mist coming before her eyes. "How stupid I am! I had quite forgotten. Yes--yes. Be sure you remember about the table-centre to-night. And sweet geranium leaves in the finger-bowls. Yes--yes." That was the tragic note jarring all the music of life; it was that she wished to forget. There was no doubt of the meaning of that scene; it could be nothing else, and whatever its meaning might have been, she could not stoop to ask any solution. And being what she thought, there was no appeal, no help; nothing for it but stoic endurance and averted eyes. Often she had listened to the bitter, godless creed that no man is without reproach, none proof against one form of temptation; that women can only wait and look away till that trouble is over-past; and insensibly the dogma had sunk into her mind, neither welcomed nor repelled, only put out of sight in the brightness and gaiety of a safe and sunny life. But would she so readily have grasped the situation except for those hats? and would he have sneered at those unlucky pieces of costume had his heart been where it should be? Not that Ermengarde admitted this to herself. "O for the wings of a dove!" she cried in her heart, and explained to herself that the Influenza demon had weakened and depressed her, that the beginning of Charlie's first term at school had made the house a desert solitude, and that she had come to realize the melancholy fact that her married life had reached the inevitable stage of monotonous indifference and mutual irritation, of which no poet sings, but ordinary mortals discourse in very plain, unvarnished prose. Once she had accustomed herself to it, no doubt she would be able to put up with it, as other women did. So far had she travelled from the petulant security of the days before the arraignment of the five rejected hats.