CHAPTER IX.

The honeymoon is a fortnight old. Mrs. Armstrong, in a pale silk of grayish blue, with ruffles of creamy lace at throat and wrists, and sparkling diamonds in her pretty pink ears, is languidly toying with a bunch of muscatel grapes, listening to the grateful plash of the waves breaking on the pebbly shore below. The room in which she sits is a charming one, delicately yet luxuriously furnished, bright with hothouse flowers, with big French windows opening on to a canopied balcony overhanging the restless waters of …