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burst into a fit of nervous weeping.
    Next morning she awoke after a troubled and restless night. At eight o’clock Miss Broadwood entered in a red and white striped bath-robe.
    “Up, up, and see the great doom’s image!” she cried, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “The hall is full of trunks, they are packing. What bolt has fallen? It’s you,
ma chérie,
you’ve brought Ulysses home again and the slaughter has begun!” She blew a cloud of smoke triumphantly from her lips and threw herself into a chair beside the bed.
    Imogen, rising on her elbow, plunged excitedly into the story of the Roux interview, which Miss Broadwood heard with the keenest interest, frequently interrupting her by exclamations of delight. When Imogen reached the dramatic scene which terminated in the destruction of the newspaper, Miss Broadwood rose and took a turn about the room, violently switching the tasselled cords of her bath-robe.
    “Stop a moment,” she cried, “you mean to tell me that he had such a heaven-sent means to bring her to her senses and didn’t use it, that he held such a weapon and threw it away?”
    “Use it?” cried Imogen unsteadily, “of course he didn’t! He bared his back to the tormentor, signed himself over to punishment in that speech he made at dinner, which every one understands but Flavia. She was here for an hour last night and disregarded every limit of taste in her maledictions.”
    “My dear!” cried Miss Broadwood, catching her hand in inordinate delight at the situation, “do you see what he has done? There’ll be no end to it. Why he has sacrificed himself to spare the very vanity that devours him, put rancours in the vessels of his peace, and his eternal jewel given to the common enemy of man, to make them kings, the seed of Banquo kings! He is magnificent!”
    “Isn’t he always that?” cried Imogen hotly. “He’s like a pillar of sanity and law in this house of shams and swollen vanities, where people stalk about with a sort of mad-house dignity, each one fancying himself a king or a pope. If you could have heard that woman talk of him! Why she thinks him stupid, bigoted, blinded by middle-class prejudices. She talked about his having no æsthetic sense, and insistedthat her artists had always shown him tolerance. I don’t know why it should get on my nerves so, I’m sure, but her stupidity and assurance are enough to drive one to the brink of collapse.”
    “Yes, as opposed to his singular fineness, they are calculated to do just that,” said Miss Broadwood gravely, wisely ignoring Imogen’s tears. “But what has been is nothing to what will be. Just wait until Flavia’s black swans have flown! You ought not to try to stick it out; that would only make it harder for every one. Suppose you let me telephone your mother to wire you to come home by the evening train?”
    “Anything, rather than have her come at me like that again. It puts me in a perfectly impossible position, and he
is
so fine!”
    “Of course it does,” said Miss Broadwood sympathetically, “and there is no good to be got from facing it. I will stay, because such things interest me, and Frau Lichtenfeld will stay because she has no money to get away, and Buisson will stay because he feels somewhat responsible. These complications are interesting enough to cold blooded folk like myself who have an eye for the dramatic element, but they are distracting and demoralizing to young people with any serious purpose in life.”
    Miss Broadwood’s counsel was all the more generous seeing that, for her, the most interesting element of this dénouement would be eliminated by Imogen’s departure. “If she goes now, she’ll get over it,” soliloquized Miss Broadwood, “if she stays she’ll be wrung for him, and the hurt may go deep enough to last. I haven’t the heart to see her spoiling things for herself.” She telephoned Mrs. Willard, and helped Imogen to pack. She even took it upon herself to break the news