she met the girl's hinted interrogations--for directly the nature of
their uneasiness, by a sort of tacit agreement, was not alluded
to--with the same smiling indifference, the same air of bland
reassurance which she brought to the discussion of a sauce or an
_entremet_ at one of those select little dinner-parties on which she
piqued herself, and which latterly had been more incessant and more
select than ever.

Only on Mary's sensitive ear something in the elaborately cheerful
tone in which she mentioned their vanished friend would occasionally
jar. It was too perfectly well done not to appear a little
exaggerated; and though she could force a smile at Lady Garnett's
persistent picture of the recalcitrant godson basking, with his
pretext of ill-health, on the sunny terraces of Monte Carlo, she
none the less cherished a suspicion that the picture was as little
convincing to its author as to herself, that her aunt also had
silent moments in which she credited the more depressing theory.

And the long silence simply deepened her conviction that, all the
time they were imposing upon themselves with such vain conjectures,
he was actually within their reach, sick and sorry and alone, in
that terrible Blackpool, which she peopled, in her imagination of a
young lady whose eastward wanderings had never extended beyond a
flower show in the Temple Gardens, with a host of vague,
inconceivable horrors.

From Bordighera, from Monaco, she argued, he would certainly have
written, if it were only a line of reassurance, for there his
isolation was impregnable. Only the fact that he had stayed on in
London could account for the need of this second arm of silence, as
well as of solitude, to enforce his complete withdrawal from the
torment of tongues.

Certainly, wherever he might actually be, the girl had never
realized more fully than just then what an irreparable gap
estrangement from him made in her life.

There was, indeed, no pause in the stream of clever, cultivated,
charming persons who rang daily at their discriminating door, who
drank tea in their drawing-room, and talked felicitously for their
entertainment.

It was a miscellaneous company, although the portal was difficult in
a manner, and opened only on conditions of its own--conditions, it
may be said, which, to the uninitiated, to the excluded, seemed
fantastic enough.

One might be anything, Lady Garnett's constant practice seemed to
enunciate, provided one was n