“Quite,” said the Home Secretary. “Quite.” But in a few days he had to resign owing to liver trouble--so it was said--and Mrs. Avalon fell in love with Prince N. P. Shuvarov. Her one lapse, you understand. All her life she had longed for this one thing, romance; and at last it had come, in the sombre eyes of a stranger. Mrs. Avalon did not know much about that Kind of Thing--the “private life”--but she knew a good deal about her friends, and that was a good deal more than she intended they should know about her. She organised her life to suit her love. It sounds beastly, that, but then you do not know Fay Avalon and I do, and that is why I know that nothing she did could ever be so beastly as if any one else did it, for she was a darling. As for Prince Shuvarov, he was Russian all the way and could organise nothing. She adored that.... II Never, never, did they go anywhere, together: neither to the play, nor to a restaurant, nor to a ball; and only very seldom was he at her house, a guest among many. But every afternoon Fay Avalon would steal to her lover’s studio in a quiet street in Hampstead. Not, of course, in her car, but in a taxi. And what a relief it was, to enter the dim, bare silence of that studio! The clatter of the voices of the luncheon-party she had just left faded instantly from her mind, a lovely mist came in between the unquiet delight of her heart and the usual labours of her life. She rested on a divan in a corner of that secret studio, while Shuvarov would pace about in his feverish way. It was a very bare studio, but it would not have remained so bare if she had had her way. Though, indeed, Fay Avalon, she who had so despised “the private life,” would have been shocked, she simply could not have helped being shocked, if he had not impatiently dismissed her offer to make of the studio a pavilion worthy of Babylonian lovers. “I make just enough money not to starve,” said Shuvarov. “And that is enough for any man.” They were, of course, quite often unhappy, for Russians are like that. There were scenes, introspective and bitter, there were accusations, quarrels, reconciliations. It was some time before Mrs. Avalon realised that it is in the Slav Temperament to make violent scenes about nothing and then to yield adorably to passionate reconciliations. It was rather wearing for the nerves, she protested. “You have lived smoothly for too long,” he retorted in a harsh moment. “You have known no wretchedness, Fay, because you have _felt_ nothing! God, you Englishwomen! In Russia our women _live_, they _feel_....” But Fay Avalon only sighed at that, certain that no woman anywhere could feel so much as she ... and she was a little afraid for herself, the way this thing she had not known before, this thing called love, had taken hold of her.