The first time I met Doria, when she crawled out of her room, a great pity smote my heart.  The ivory of her face had turned to wax, and she had dwindled into a fragile reed, and in her eyes quivered the apprehension of an ill-treated dog.  I put my arm round her and hugged her reassuringly, not knowing what else to do, and mumbled a few silly words.  Then I settled her down before the drawing-room fire, and rushed out into the garden and cut the last poor lingering autumn roses, and, returning, cast them into her lap.  And we talked hard about the roses; and I told her which were Madame Abel Chatenay, which Marquise de Salisbury, and which Frau Karl Druska, which Lady Ursula and which Lady Hillingdon.  We did not refer at all to unhappy things.

It was only some days afterwards that she ventured to raise the veil of her awful desolation.  But she had no need to tell me.  Any fool could have divined it.  Together with far less shattering of idols has many a woman’s reason been brought down.  And in our poor Doria’s case it was not only the shattering of idols.

“Hilary, dear,” she said, with a mournful attempt at a smile.  “I can’t go on living here for ever.”

“Why not?” I asked.  “This is a vast barrack of a place, and you’re only just a bit of a wee white mouse.  And we love our pets.  Why do you want to go?”

We were walking up and down the drive.  It was a warm, damp morning and the trees shaken by the mild southwester shed their leaves around us in a golden shower; and the leaves that had fallen lay sodden on the grass borders.  Here and there a surviving blossom of antirrhinum swaggered among its withered brethren as if to maintain the illusion of summer.  A partridge or two whirred across the path from copse to meadow.  The gentle sadness of the autumn day had moved her to discourse on the mutability of mundane things.  Hence, by chain of association, I suppose, her sudden remark.

“I don’t want to go,” she replied.  “I should like to stay in the dreamy peace of Northlands for ever.  But I have been a pet for such a long time—­for years, and I’ve shown myself to be such a bad pet—­biting the hand that fed me.”

I bade her not talk foolishly.  She moved her small shoulder.

“It’s true.  While the three of you—­you and Barbara and Jaffery—­were doing for me what has never been done for another human being, I was all the time snarling and snapping.  I can’t make out how you can bear the sight of me.”  She clenched her hands and straightened her arms down tense.  “The thought of it scorches me,” she cried suddenly.

“Whatever you did, dear,” said I, “was so natural; and we understood it all.  How could we blame you?”

We had, in fact, blamed her on many occasions, not being as gods to whom human hearts are open books; but this was not the occasion on which to tell her so.  I don’t like the devil being called the father of lies.  I am convinced that the discoverer of mendacity was a warm-hearted philanthropist, who has never received due credit, and that the devil having seized hold of his discovery perverted it to his own diabolical uses.  It is the sort of plagiaristic thing that devils, whether they promote ancient Gehennas or modern companies, have been doing since the world began.