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 that time of any past relations between Sir Nicolas and herself, though I could quite imagine that any man would have gone out of his way to do a turn to so kind-hearted a creature. Yet what kindness he had shown to her, or in what position they had stood to each other, I knew no more than the dead. Her whole life seemed to me to be as great a mystery as any thing I had ever heard of. She had plenty of money, and yet she lived in a hovel where I wouldn't have stabled a donkey. She had the grace and fascination of twenty women, and yet there was not a whisper of a love affair in her life. They told you at the theatre of a hundred offers of marriage which she had declined; they spoke of the "opportunities" she had given the cold shoulder to; of the extraordinary silence which she maintained whenever her own life was mentioned. No nun in a convent could have blotted out her past more successfully. People declared that they worshipped her. They could say no more; and even the boldest of them never dared to put a second embarrassing question to the woman who knew so well how to keep her own secrets and to defend them.

I thought of all these things on my way from Chelsea to Gower Street, and while I could make nothing of them, I was far from easy about our own future. A big-hearted man like Nicky Steele, who never said no to a woman in his life, was always dangerous when there was a woman hanging about him; and I knew well enough that little Lilian