Why they did not remain longer in the south they themselves could scarcely explain. They had arranged to spend a month there, and then to proceed to Paris to wait indefinitely until their new house in the Cromwell Road should be ready to receive them. There is nothing so irrefragable as an arbitrary programme. Even the most emancipated enslave themselves to it sometimes, as in the present case did Thornton and Clytie They possibly lost a good deal,--the flowers of life seldom grow along the beaten track,--but they never thought of attributing it to the fixity of their programme. They were in Paris, then, living under totally fresh conditions. Thornton found there a succession of friends and acquaintances, and was pleased rather than otherwise to meet them. At Monte Carlo he fled from Carteret of the Hussars; on the Boulevard des Capucines he greeted him heartily and carried him off into the American Bar. Besides discovering acquaintances daily in the hotel list, Thornton was not unknown in general Parisian society. His name could procure him admission into most circles that he cared to enter. He was put up at a couple of clubs and received invitation cards by the dozen. To please him Clytie went with him a little into society. He was proud of his beautiful wife, loved to watch the effect produced as she entered a drawing-room upon his arm, and the eager admiration on the faces of the men who crowded round her chair. In fact, Clytie had a small social success--and a paragraph in the _Figaro_. It was a new sensation for her; but in these early days of her married life she would have preferred a quieter, less conspicuous existence. But Thornton, just as he had sought in the south to keep her and her beauty to himself, now seemed to wish to exhibit it abroad. “I seem to wear you like a decoration, darling,” he said once. At first Clytie flushed with pleasure at the little flattery. Then she thought over it for a bit, and it did not please her so much. But she did not confide this to her husband. She had already begun to discover that for the safekeeping of many little matters her own heart was the best place.