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sure Sylvia will find that most interesting. Looks as though the French ancestor has moved further back in history. Bah! The woman is impossible.”

He was rather abstracted during the remainder of the proceedings, and short in his replies to Mrs. Langham, who fawned upon him. Every now and then it would occur to him that perhaps Harley had not been so much to blame for his indiscretion, after all.

****

In the comparative darkness of Courtenay Street, Patricia Weybourn quickly walked off the glow of battle. She walked the entire length of the street twice, striving to hold her hate of Mrs. Langham to the exclusion of her love for Harley. She was not strong enough.

She leaned against a retaining wall and gazed upwards at the calm, star-speckled sky—and at last came the tears which she had almost despaired of shedding.

A few belated passers-by peered curiously at the girl who stood motionless with up-flung head in the full light of the stars, but the early dawn alone had power to disturb her.

Round 2 of the Langham v. Weybourn fight took place on the morning of the third day after the earthquake.

Mrs. Langham, dismayed to find the crust of her social world so thin that it was necessary for her to tread lightly if she were to continue to live in it, strove diligently to pass over the distressing scene at the theatre with an airy lightness which ill-became her mental and physical heaviness. She professed to “see the funny side of it”—in which profession she was very much alone. She admitted to an unpardonable hastiness, and said that the least she could do