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Janet moved away, unhappiness in her heart. The people around her were all in an instant ghosts to her. Not one of them save the Duke belonged to her. She wanted him with a sudden desperate need that was only, as she well knew, the precursor of many future needs. But she did not see him. The room thickened and darkened around her. She had made some horrible mistake. She would be punished all her life because she was selling herself, body and soul, for comfort. That it was not her comfort made no difference; and surely she saw clearly enough to-night that it would not be Rosalind's comfort. Why had she done this thing? What crazy impulse had driven her? The consciousness of her friendship with Wildherne had left her. Friendship when he was madly in love with another woman?

She looked everywhere for her sister; then found herself face to face with the very last human being whom at that distracted moment she wished to encounter, the Duchess's protégée, Caroline Marsh. The girl was standing against the wall by herself. She looked plain and awkward in her white dress, her pince-nez ill-fitting so that with a perpetual nervous movement she was for ever pushing them back against her eyes.