“--That your ideal of a real man, the sort of man a woman loses her head for, was--” He stopped. Carey’s description of the Lord Holme and Leo Ulford type had not been very delicate. “Was--?” she said, with insistence. “Was--?” Robin thought how she had hurt him, and said: “Carey said, a huge mass of bones, muscles, thews, sinews, that cares nothing for beauty.” “Beauty! That doesn’t care for beauty! But then--?” “Carey meant--yes, I’m sure Carey meant real beauty.” “What do you mean by ‘real beauty’?” “An inner light that radiates outward, but whose abiding-place is hidden--perhaps. But one can’t say. One can only understand and love.” “Oh. And Mr. Carey said that. Was he--was he at all that evening as he was at Arkell House? Was he talking nonsense or was he serious?” “Difficult to say! But he was not as he was at Arkell House. Which knows you best--Carey or I?” “Neither of you. I don’t know myself.” “What are you going to do?” “I don’t know. The only thing I know is that you can’t tell me what to do.” “No, I can’t.” “But perhaps I can tell you.” She put down her cup and looked at him with a sort of grave kindness that he had never seen in her face before. “What to do?” “Yes.” “Well?” “Give up loving the white angel. Perhaps it isn’t there. Perhaps it doesn’t exist. And if it does--perhaps it’s a poor, feeble thing that’s no good to me, no good to me.” Suddenly she put her arms on the back of the couch, leaned her face on them and began to cry gently. Robin was terribly startled. He got up, stretched out his hands to her in an impulsive gesture, then drew them back, turned and went to the window. She was crying for Fritz. That was absurd and horrible. Yet he knew that those tears came from the heart of the hidden woman he had so long believed in, proved her existence, showed that she could love. CHAPTER XII AS Lady Holme had foreseen, the impertinent mimicry of Miss Schley concentrated a great deal of attention upon the woman mimicked. Many people, accepting the American’s cleverness as a fashionable fact, also accepted her imitation as the imitation of a fact more surreptitious, and credited Lady Holme with a secret leading towards the improper never before suspected by them. They remembered the break between the Holmes and Carey, the strange scene at the Arkell House ball, and began to whisper many things of Lady Holme, and to turn a tide of pity and of sympathy upon her husband. On this tide Lord Holme and the American might be said to float merrily like corks, unabashed in the eye of the sun. Their intimacy was condoned on all sides as a natural result of Lady Holme’s conduct. Most of that which had been accomplished by Lord and Lady Holme together after their reconciliation over the first breakfast was undone. The silent tongue began to wag, and to murmur the usual platitudes about the poor fellow who could not find sympathy at home and so was obliged, against his will, to seek for it outside.