Page:The Yellow Book - 06.djvu/163

 She was acting now, not to gain her point, but to hide her real feelings. And unconsciously she won her game, as it must always be won.

"Why do you say that?" he asked, coming nearer to her.

"It is not I who say it. I am merely repeating what you have said to me dozens of times. What nonsense we are talking! Shall we go in to the others?"

Ten o clock struck slowly from a neighbouring church tower, and they stood and counted the strokes in silence as though the slight mental effort was a sort of relief to their constraint. Then she moved a little and felt his touch on her bare arm.

"Don't go, Cynthia."

He crushed her hand against his lips and pulled her almost roughly towards him.

"There are not twenty others," he whispered.

When the two men left the house together half an hour later Adrian uttered an exclamation in an unduly loud tone.

"I say, that s rather strong, isn't it?" said Dicky, whose reflections were of a peculiarly happy nature.

"It's not nearly strong enough for the fools who make wills," replied Adrian, and drove off alone in a hansom.

III

For a woman who has staked everything and won the game sooner then she expected, Mrs. Angelo Milton wore a singularly dissatisfied appearance when she came downstairs the next morning. She wrote letters in her boudoir until the smell of the window flowers became intolerable and she had to take refuge in the drawing-room; and there she had two separate quarrels with the