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face no b igger than the centre of this plate, Unwin regards him with the utmost respect and affection, don't you, dear ! ’
    'Respect, yes,' said Unwin, `for his teeth are devilish sharp'
    Ross said to Elizabeth: `This is some pleasant joke you are trying on me?'
    Elizabeth smiled with a sudden brittle brilliance. `Oh, it's a joke indeed. But it is against myself, Ross. Didn't you know? I wonder you never guessed.'
    `Guessed .. '
    `Well, if you did not guess, it might have been more gallant of you to have met this barefaced confession halfway. Is it such an astonishment that a woman who changed her mind once could change it twice?. . Well, yes, perhaps it is, for it has always been an astonishment and a humiliation to me. '
    After what seemed a long time Ross said: 'That first Easter I came to you after you married-you told me then plain enough that you loved only Francis and had no thoughts for anyone else `Was that when I should have told you? Only a few months after my marriage, and with Geoffrey Charles already alive in me?'
    Something was taken away from Ross and another dish put in its place. Whatever the object of the party, Sir John was not sparing his cellar, and talk at the table w as louder than it had been. Yet Ross had to struggle with himself not to push his, chair back and get away. That Elizabeth should have chosen this moment .... Unless it was that only the presence of other people had given her the courage to tell him paint-blank what she had long wanted him to know. . . . And where a few minutes ago he had made no sense of what she said, now he saw it as sensible enough. Every second that passed fi tted it more inescapably into the pattern of the last nine years.
    `And Francis?'' he said,. `Does he know?'
    `I've said already too much, Ross. My tongue. A sudden impulse - it had best be forgotten. Or, if not forgotten, disregarded. What were we talking of before this?'
    Three places down the table, Francis's slightly raffish face, in which the vivid lines of youth were losing themselves in a too early deterioration. . As if conscious just then of something toward, he glanced up at Ross, wrinkled one eyebrow and winked.
    Francis had known. Ross saw that now. Francis had known so long that his early outburst of disillusion and disappointment were far behind him. His own jealousy long spent, and perhaps his love with it, he felt no discomfort at seeing Ross and Elizabeth together. His quarrels in earlier years, the enigmas of his behaviour, were all explained. And now so far as he was concerned it was all past - part of an era best forgotten, in this new time of tolerance and good will.
    Perhaps, Ross thought, that was why Elizabeth had now ventured to tell him; because: her feeling was spent and she believed Ross's to be; she'd offered it as an explanation, an apology of things past, something due to him now that danger no longer existed for any of them in the confession.
    Eliza beth had turned to answer some question put by the man on the other side of her, and it was a moment or two before Ross was able to see her face again. Even then she didn't meet his eyes, but he knew instantly by something in her expression - if he had not in fact known all along-that for her the question was not in the very, least a dead on e and she did not suppose it to be so for him.
     
    After the ladies had left, there was half an hour with the port, and then the sexes were reshuffled for tea and coffee.
    Ross had one other meeting with Caroline Penvenen, He was passing a small withdrawing-room when he heard angry words and recognised the voice as Unwin Trevaunance a. He had only gone a few more paces when he heard the door bang sharply and quick footsteps caught him; up at the door of the main drawing-room. He stepped back to let Carolin e go in before him. She smiled at him rather breathlessly, her eyes still glinting with a disappearing emotion.
    As he seemed ab out to move away, she said : 'Might I have your company for a