"Oh, dear," she answered, "I must have been terribly tactless--to make
you so angry."

Mr. Lanley drew himself up.

"I was not angry," he said.

She looked at him with a sort of gentle wonder.

"You gave me the impression of being."

The very temperateness of the reply made him see that he had been
inaccurate.

"Of course I was angry," he said. "What I mean is that I don't understand
why I was."

Meantime, on the opposite side of the table, Mathilde and Pete were
equally immersed, murmuring sentences of the profoundest meaning behind
faces which they felt were mask-like.

Farron looked down the table at his wife. Why, he wondered, did she want
to tease him to-night, of all nights in his life?

When they came out of the dining-room Pete said to Mathilde with the
utmost clearness:

"And what was that magazine you spoke of?"