Mabel was not a congenital liar. She had, indeed, displayed a fairly truthful record until John Ordham came into her life. When little, she had been duly punished for telling the fibs natural to childhood; and, during the years that followed, those faculties with which the social unit adapts itself automatically, and economically, to the exigencies of the moment, had in her case been put to little strain, indulged young beauty that she was. She was a good girl in all ways, and after turning on the fountain of those beautiful crystal tears, or terrifying the parent whose solitary passion she was, she had the grace to be ashamed of herself, vowing never to repeat the offence. As she grew older, she broke this vow less and less often.

But the long coaching of her mother and Lady Bridgminster had wrought its inevitable work. She was merely one more victim of the disabilities of her sex. She could not go frankly forth and woo the man to whom she had immediately surrendered her heart; she must scheme, and wait, blow hot and cold, demoralize her character generally. She had no cleverness save in female craft, but she was vaguely conscious during those weeks when Ordham wooed her with a silken rope round his neck and a padded prod at his back, that the crystalline quality of her girl’s mind was permanently clouding.

She had assumed, of course, that after marriage her influence would be paramount. Had not momma ruled poppa? Was not the ascendency of the American woman one of the truisms of the century? She rode gayly into the breakers of generalities oblivious of the rocks beneath, whose other name is facts.

The result of that triumphant little confession in the library had given her self-confidence a profound shock. As time went on she found her husband more and more of a mystery, caught blinding glimpses of wants far beyond her comprehension, of dissimilar tastes, of an almost world-old brain, and, in spite of his youthful ardours, of an inner impenetrable reserve. She had almost despised him at times during the courtship, so easy had been the game, so completely had he been deluded. But Ordham was not a man to be despised for more than a moment at a time, and he had won her complete respect on that fatal day in the library when he had given her to understand that when people were so simple as to lay their cards on the table no will but his would prevail. But after the lachrymal attack was over (genuine enough upon this occasion), she had reflected that the cleverest of men would be no match for three clever women if they kept their cards out of sight. She had lost no time calling to her aid Lady Bridgminster and her mother, and a new campaign of gentle manipulation began. Live on the Continent she would not; where one could never drink water and the food ruined one’s complexion, where she must be taken in to dinner by an attaché, instead of by a prince of the blood, where she must play fourth fiddle to old frumps with frizzed fronts and bugles and not a tenth part of her income. Not she. Jackie could have all the career he wanted in England.

She was enchanted at the idea of having a baby, not only because she possessed all those charming feminine instincts which would have made her an estimable woman had circumstances permitted, but because it gratified her to feel one of a line, to be the indispensable connecting link between one Bridgminster and the next. It is only the well-born American that is deeply impressed with the antiquity of English blood, of a descent in which figure historic names; for all these represent what they feel they have just missed, and to capture them for their issue is a triumph far more subtle than that experienced by the American who belongs to the aristocracy of wealth alone. Not that Mabel was capable of any such analysis, but her mother was; the instinct was in her, however, and it is doubtful if she would have adored Ordham as blindly and devoutly as she did had it not been for that long record of his family in Burke, and the magnificence of Ordham Castle. But, to be sure, minus these causes, and he would not have been John Ordham.

Once more he was unconsciously demonstrating the inferiority of his sex when pitted against hers. But like many another, she forgot that there is a psychological statute of limitations, also that it is impossible to watch the man?uvres of an enemy whose existence is unknown. She was pouting in bed late on Sunday night, wondering if her husband intended to sit up until dawn again, almost hating the social triumphs that so oddly separated them, when the............