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grandmother died he didn’t go as far as to give up bridge altogether but he declared on nothing but black suits for the next three months. That, I think, was really beautiful.”
    The Princess was not impressed.
    â€œI think you must be very self-indulgent and live only for amusement,” she said. “A life of pleasure-seeking and card-playing anddissipation brings only dissatisfaction. You will find that out some day.”
    â€œOh, I know it turns out that way sometimes,” assented Reginald. “Forbidden fizz is often the sweetest.”
    But the remark was wasted on the Princess, who preferred champagne that had at least a suggestion of dissolved barley-sugar.
    â€œI hope you will come and see me again,” she said in a tone that prevented the hope from becoming too infectious; adding as a happy after-thought, “you must come to stay with us in the country.”
    Her particular part of the country was a few hundred versts the other side of Tamboff, with some fifteen miles of agrarian disturbance between her and the nearest neighbour. Reginald felt that there is some privacy which should be sacred from intrusion.

THE RETICENCE OF LADY ANNE
    E GBERT came into the large, dimly lit drawing-room with the air of a man who is not certain whether he is entering a dovecote or a bomb factory, and is prepared for either eventuality. The little domestic quarrel over the luncheon-table had not been fought to a definite finish, and the question was how far Lady Anne was in a mood to renew or forgo hostilities. Her pose in the arm-chair by the tea-table was rather elaborately rigid; in the gloom of a December afternoon Egbert’s pince-nez did not materially help him to discern the expression of her face.
    By way of breaking whatever ice might be floating on the surface he made a remark about a dim religious light. He or Lady Anne were accustomed to make that remark between 4.30 and 6 on winter and late autumn evenings; it was a part of their married life. There was no recognized rejoinder to it and Lady Anne made none.
    Don Tarquinio lay astretch on the Persian rug, basking in the firelight with superb indifference to the possible ill-humour of Lady Anne. His pedigree was as flawlessly Persian as the rug, and his ruff was coming into the glory of its second winter. The page-boy, who had Renaissance tendencies, had christened him Don Tarquinio. Left to themselves, Egbert and Lady Anne would unfailingly have called him Fluff, but they were not obstinate.
    Egbert poured himself out some tea. As the silence gave no sign of breaking on Lady Anne’s initiative, he braced himself for another Yermak effort.
    â€œMy remark at lunch had a purely academic application,” he announced; “you seem to put an unnecessarily personal significance into it.”
    Lady Anne maintained her defensive barrier of silence. The bullfinch lazily filled in the interval with an air from
Iphigénie en Tauride.
Egbert recognized it immediately, because it was the only air the bullfinch whistled, and he had come to them with the reputation for whistling it. Both Egbert and Lady Anne would have preferred something from
The Yeoman of the Guard,
which was their favourite opera. In matters artistic they had a similarity of taste. They leaned towards the honest and explicit in art, a picture, for instance, that told its own story, with generous assistance from its title. A riderless warhorse with harness in obvious disarray, staggering into a courtyard full of pale swooning women, and marginally noted “Bad News,” suggested to their minds a distinct interpretation of some military catastrophe. They could see what it was meant to convey, and explain it to friends of duller intelligence.
    The silence continued. As a rule Lady Anne’s displeasure became articulate and markedly voluble after four minutes of introductory muteness. Egbert seized the milk-jug and poured some of its contents into Don