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I've known Hylda since she was ten, and I've known him since the minute he came into the world, and I've got the measure of both. She is the finest essence the middle class can distil, and he, oh, he's paraffin-vin ordinaire, if you like it better, a selfish, calculating adventurer!" Lord Windlehurst chuckled mordantly. "Adventurer! That's what they called me with more reason.

His boundless egotism had widened the chasm between Hylda and himself, which had been made on the day when she fell ill in London, with Lacey's letter in her hand. It had not grown less in the weeks that followed.

"What a person of importance I am!" answered Hylda, with a laugh that was far from mirthful, though she caught the plump, wrinkled little hand of the Duchess and pressed it. "But really I'm getting well here fast. I'm very strong again. It is so restful, and one's days go by so quietly." "Yet, I'm not sure that it's rest you want. I don't think it is. You want tonics men and women and things.

Hylda watched the shops, the houses, the squares, as she passed westward, her mind dwelling almost happily on the new determination to which she had come. It was not love that was moving her, not love for him, but a deeper thing. He had brutally killed love the full life of it those months ago; but there was a deep thing working in her which was as near nobility as the human mind can feel.

"I want you to help us to get rid of this," and he pointed to the broken jewelry. "How?" I asked dismayed, for I confess that I feared the discovery. To be thus intimately associated with a band of expert crooks was a new experience. "Quite easily," he replied. "I'll show you." Then turning to his wife, he said: "Just bring Lu Chang in, will you, Hylda?"

"Why, did you expect Eglington?" the Duchess asked idly, yet she was watchful too, alert for every movement in this life where the footsteps of happiness were falling by the edge of a precipice, over which she would not allow herself to look. She knew that Hylda did not expect Eglington, for the decision to come to the opera was taken at the last moment.

"I'm late, I know; but you'll forgive me you'll forgive me, dear lady," he added to Hylda, "for I've been listening to your husband making a smashing speech for a bad cause." Hylda smiled. "Then I must go and congratulate him," she answered, and withdrew her hand from that of Lord Windlehurst, who seemed to hold it longer than usual, and pressed it in a fatherly way.

La, la, but I was proud when he first called me that the Prime Minister of England. I'm going to watch the sun rise again to-morrow, my darling. I didn't know it was so beautiful, and gave one such an appetite." She broke a piece of bread, and, not waiting to butter it, almost stuffed it into her mouth. Hylda leaned over and pressed her arm. "What a good mother Betty it is!" she said tenderly.

"He married from conviction, if ever a man did. Look at her beauty, look at her fortune, listen to her tongue. Don't you think conviction was easy?" Lord Windlehurst looked at Hylda approvingly. She has the real gift little information, but much knowledge, the primary gift of public life.

In David's mind there was no suspicion that Nahoum knew the truth. The suggestion in his words had seemed natural; but, from the first, a sharp suspicion was in the mind of Hylda, and his last words had convinced her that if Nahoum did not surely know the truth, he suspected it all too well.