"If everything is to put us more at odds," he said, rather stiffly,
"the sooner I withdraw, the better. I am sorry I have fallen under your
displeasure; it is generally my ill luck to annoy you."

And in a few moments he was going down the street in a frame of mind
not unusual to him after a call upon Miss Mott, from whose house he was
apt to come away so ruffled and irritated that nothing short of a
counteracting feminine influence could restore his self-complacency.

This office of comforter usually fell to the lot of Mrs. Frederick
Staggchase. Indeed, his fondness for this lady was so marked as to give
rise to some question among his intimates whether he were not more
attached to her than to the avowed object of his affection.

An hour after he had made his precipitate retreat from Ethel's, he
found himself sitting in the library at Mrs. Staggchase's, with his
hostess comfortably enthroned in a great chair of carved oak on the
opposite side of the fire. The conversation had somehow turned upon
marriage. There is always a certain fascination, a piquant if faint
sense of being upon the borderland of the forbidden, which makes such a
discussion attractive to a man and woman who are playing at making love
when marriage stands between them.

"But, of course," Rangely had said, "two married people can't live at
peace when one of them is in love with somebody else."

Mrs. Staggchase clasped with her slender hand the ball at the end of
the carved arm of the chair in which she was sitting, looking absently
at the rings which adorned her fingers. She possessed to perfection the
art of being serious, and the air with which she now spoke was