"It is you who make us value our youth and looks so much," said Lady Carlyon in response, smiling and composed, though all the while her heart was beating with pain--pain for herself and for her husband. "Mrs. March, I see, has brought Talbott with her, and Talbott’s backing, I take it, is worth that of ten ordinary men with pistols in their pockets," was Lord Baudesert’s next remark. "Sir Percy can never forget his obligations to General Talbott," replied Lady Carlyon. "And Alicia March won’t let him forget them if he would." Then, catching sight of Mrs. Chantrey taking her constitutional, Lord Baudesert halted the carriage, scrambled out, and was soon promenading up and down Connecticut Avenue with that eternally hopeful lady, to her undisguised rapture. She lamented to Lord Baudesert Eleanor’s hardness of heart toward the other sex, and Lord Baudesert was lauding the unexpected good sense of the three Vereker girls, each one of whom had married a curate, and could not expect to do any better. Lady Carlyon, when she reached home, and was alone with her husband, told him of the new arrivals. "You must prepare to meet them," she said resolutely, "and even to have them to dinner." Sir Percy sighed heavily. "What have I not brought upon you, my poor child?" he said. "Nothing I cannot bear," responded Lady Carlyon. Three days afterwards the expected happened--Alicia March and General Talbott called at the British Embassy. They came at an hour when they were sure to find the Carlyons at home. As Lady Carlyon had said, Mrs. March gave no outward sign of the stress and storm through which she must have passed. She and Lady Carlyon met and talked as do two women of the world who mutually hate and distrust each other, but who expect to meet at dinner. Mrs. March spoke pleasantly of her travels with her father. They had spent two winters in Egypt, and their summers cruising on the Dalmatian coast, but, after all, she said, Washington was the most agreeable place of all the winter resorts she had ever known, and she had determined to pass her winters there hereafter. She did not tell Lady Carlyon of the strange desire she felt to get back to the same orbit in which Sir Percy moved, nor of the equally strange inability she had to forget her husband. She had every reason to remain abroad, where the catastrophe of her Washington life was little known, and where the prestige of her father’s name was greater and more general, but that strange instinct which makes a murderer return to the scene of his crime will always make a woman like Alicia March return to the scene of her adventures.