ed him with critical eyes, acknowledging his
attractiveness, and--like others before her--wondering wherein the
attraction lay, but concerning one thing she had known no uncertainty,
she had known that he had been bored to leave so early! There had been
nothing of the eager lover about him, as he turned with Teresa to the
door. Grizel felt the flatness of her own voice as she asked: "When?
How long? I didn't know..."

"Only on Tuesday. After the dinner party at the Court, I believe. He
brought her home. Of course you were there, and saw them together.
Didn't you suspect?"

"Never." Grizel shook her head. "I should not have suspected if I'd
met them a hundred times. She is not all the kind of girl I should have
expected--"

Mrs Evans was seized with a small, tickling cough, and Grizel, looking
at her, met a glance of warning. She hesitated, and compromised.

"I hardly know her, of course. She must be nice if he likes her. He is
a charming man."

Mrs Gardiner allowed herself the relief of a phantom sniff. Mrs
Beverley she considered was putting on "side." She had known Dane and
Teresa for precisely the same length of time, yet she spoke of one as a
friend, of the other as the merest acquaintance. It was but another
example of county _versus_ town, and as such to be personally resented.

"I am very much attached to Teresa Mallison. She is a very nice,
well-brought-up girl. She will make him an excellent wife. I think he
is very much to be congratulated," she said stiffly, and the little
speech was memorable, inasmuch as it was the only one delivered in the
High Street that day, in which Dane himself was singled out for
congratulation!

"Are you walking towards home, Mrs Beverley? Perhaps we might go so
far together," said the Vicar's wife, as Mrs Gardiner nodded adieu, and
entered the grocer's shop, and the two women turned into a side street,
composed of those dreary stucco-faced little villas which seem the
special abode of insurance agents and dressmakers. The houses continued
but a short way, and then gave place to nursery gardens, and scattered
habitations of a better type. Grizel hated the mean little houses, not
for any sympathy for the inconvenience which they must cause to their
inhabitants, but because she herself was bound to pass them on her way
to the High Street. She amused herself by planning wholesale fires, in
which entire terraces would be devoured, and in a hazy, indefinite