unsheathed dagger of love.

And Fate, having mislaid her glasses, worked her shuttle at hazard in
and out of that picture of intricate pattern called Life, and having
tangled and knotted together the crimson thread of passion, the golden
thread of youth and the honest brown of a deep, undemonstrative love,
she left the disentanglement of the muddle in the hands of Olivia,
Duchess of Longacres.

Her Grace was over eighty.

Of a line of yeomen ancestors ranging back down the centuries to the
William Carew who had fought for Harold, she had been, about sixty-five
years ago, the belle of Devon. Against the warnings of her heart and
to the delight of her friends and family, she had married the Duke of
Longacres, whose roving eye had been arrested by her beauty at a meet
of the Devon and Somerset, and his equally roving heart temporarily
captured by the indifference of her demeanour towards his autocratic
self.

She had lost him, to all intents and purposes, two years after the
marriage, but blinding her eyes and stuffing her ears, had held high
her beautiful head and high her honour, filling her empty heart with
the love of her son and the esteem of her legion of real friends;
showing the bravest of beautiful faces to the world, until a happy
widowhood had set her free.

Some years of absolute happiness of the simplest kind had followed; the
marriage of her son and birth of her grandson, who had cost his mother
her life. Then the following year had come the Boer War, and the