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"I must be taking her back, Aunt Anne," the Duke said. "She's the heroine to-night, you know."

"So she is. So she is. I like her. I like her very much indeed. Kiss me, my dear. May God bless you and keep you and give you fine children worthy of their grandfather."

Her hot trembling hand rested for an instant on Janet's cool forehead.

Soon she was standing in the long drawing-room, the Duchess on one side of her, Wildherne on the other. This was not an official reception; they stood there casually as though accident had placed them, and yet in a moment it was official, as official as though it were a Court Drawing-Room.

And so, in its Purefoy world, it was. Yes, and further than that, in its section of England ruled by the Purefoys, Medleys, Chichesters and Darrants it had that significance, for the Duke and Duchess were King and Queen of that section and Janet bride of the Heir-Apparent.

She had not realised—she had had as yet no opportunity of realising—how immensely self-sufficient, self-important, and secure this world was. It was disregarded almost entirely by the Press of the day. Its house parties, receptions, journeys were scarcely recorded. The illustrated papers, the novels of the time, the scandals, the fashions had no concern with it. Any account of the England of the moment was preoccupied with a Post-War Society, apparently conscienceless, heartless, and creedless, and yet this Post-War Society was numerically minute and potentially inorganic compared with this unperturbed, resolved, static Society that, infinitely poorer of course than before the war, yet carried on its creeds, its ceremonies, its responsibilities precisely as though no other Society existed.