It was Kitty herself who inadvertently touched the spring which let loose the bolt.

“What’s the news in town, Ralph?” she asked.  “Surely you gleaned something, even though you were only there for a single night?”

Fenton laughed.

“Would I dare to come back to you without the latest?” he returned, smiling.  “The very latest is that Maryon Rooke is to be married.”

A silence followed, as though a bombshell had descended in their midst and scattered the whole party to the four winds of heaven.

Then Kitty, making a desperate clutch at her self-possession, remarked rather superficially: 

“Surely that’s not true?  I thought Maryon was far too confirmed a bachelor to be beguiled into the holy bonds.”

“It’s perfectly true,” returned Fenton.  “First-hand source.  I ran across Rooke himself and it was he who told me.  They’re to be married very shortly, I believe.”

Fell another awkward silence.  Then: 

“So old Rooke will be in the cart with the rest of us poor married men,” observed Barry, whose lazy blue eyes had yet contrived to notice that Nan’s slim fingers were nervously occupied in crumbling her bread into small pieces.

“In the car, rather,” responded Ralph, “The lady is fabulously wealthy, I believe.  Former husband, a steel magnate or something of the sort.”

“Well, that will help Maryon in his profession,” said Nan, “with a quiet composure that was rather astonishing.  But, as usual, in a social crisis of this nature, she seemed able to control her voice, though her restless fingers betrayed her.

“Yes, presumably that’s why he’s marrying her,” replied Ralph.  “It can’t be a case of love at first sight”—­grimly.

“Isn’t she pretty, then?” asked Penelope.

“Plain as a pikestaff”—­with emphasis.  “I’ve met her once or twice—­Lady Beverley.”

It appeared from the chorus which followed that everyone present knew her more or less.

“I should think she is plain!” exclaimed Kitty heartily.

“Yes, she’d need to be very well gilded,” commented her husband.

“You’re all rather severe, aren’t you?” suggested Lord St. John.  “After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

“Not with an artist,” asserted Nan promptly.  “He can’t see beauty where there isn’t any.”

To the depths of her soul she felt that this was true, and inwardly she recoiled violently from the idea of Maryon’s marriage.  She had been bitterly hurt by his treatment of her, but to a certain extent she had been able to envisage the whole affair from his point of view and to understand it.

A rising young artist, if he wishes to succeed, cannot afford to hamper himself with a wife and contend with the endless sordid details of housekeeping conducted on a necessarily economical scale.  It slowly but surely deadens the artist in him—­the delicate creative inspiration that is so easily smothered by material cares and worries.  Nan refused to blame Maryon simply because he had not married her then and there.  But she could not forgive him for deliberately seeking her out and laying on her that strange fascination of his when, in his own heart, he must have known that he would always ultimately place his art before love.