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THE AVENGER

angry with you, and I shall make myself very, very agreeable to him, and who knows but he will forget all about you?' But Louise she only shake her head. She knows her own countrymen too well. They are so terribly insularly constant."

"Is that such a very bad quality, Baroness?"

"Ah! I find it so," she admitted. "I do not like the man who can think of only one thing, only one woman at a time. He is so dull, he has no imagination. If he has only one sweetheart, how can he know anything about us? for in a hundred different women there are no two alike."

"That is all very well," Wrayson answered, smiling; "but, you see, if a man cares very much for one particular woman, he hasn't the least curiosity about the rest of her sex."

She sighed gently, and her eyes flashed her regrets. Very blue eyes they were to-day, almost as blue as the turquoises about her throat.

"They say," she murmured, "that some Englishmen are like that. It is so much a pity—when they are nice!"

"I suppose," he suggested, "that yours is the Continental point of view."

She was silent until the waiter, who was filling her glass with white wine, had departed. Then she leaned over towards him. Her forehead was a little wrinkled, her eyebrows raised. She had the half-plaintive air of a child who is complaining of being unjustly whipped.

"Yes! I think it is," she answered. "The lover, as I know him, is one who could not be unkind to a woman. In his heart he is faithful, perhaps, to one, but for her sake the whole world of beautiful women are objects of