that evening he had found an important
foreign telegram posted up at the small literary club to which he had
belonged since Oxford days. He made a remark about it now to Count
Wielandt; and the diplomatist, turning rather unwillingly to face his
questioner, recognised that the remark was a shrewd one.

Presently the young man's frank intelligence had told. On his way to and
from the Holy Land three years before Robert had seen something of the
East, and it so happened that he remembered the name of Count Wielandt
as one of the foreign secretaries of legation present at an official
party given by the English Ambassador at Constantinople, which he and
his mother had attended on their return journey, in virtue of a family
connection with the Ambassador. All that he could glean from memory he
made quick use of now, urged at first by the remorseful wish to make
this new world into which he had brought Catherine less difficult than
he knew it must have been during the last quarter of an hour.

But after a while he found himself leading the talk of a section of the
room, and getting excitement and pleasure out of the talk itself. Ever
since that Eastern journey he had kept an eye on the subjects which had
interested him then, reading in his rapid voracious way all that came
across him at Murewell, especially in the squire's foreign newspapers
and reviews, and storing it when read in a remarkable memory.

Catherine, after the failure of some conversational attempts between her
and Madame de Netteville, fell to watching her husband with a start of
strangeness and surprise. She had scarcely seen him at Oxford among his
equals; and she had very rarely been present at his talks with the
squire. In some ways, and owing to the instinctive reserves set up
between them for so long, her intellectual knowledge of him was very
imperfect. His ease, his resource, among these men of the world, for
whom--independent of all else--she felt a countrywoman's dislike, filled
her with a kind of bewilderment.

'Are you new to London?' Lady Aubrey asked her presently, in that tone
of absolute detachment from the person addressed which certain women
manage to perfection. She, too, had been watching the husband, and the
sight had impressed her with a momentary curiosity to know what the
stiff, handsome, dowdily-dressed wife was made of.

'We have been two months here,' said Catherine, her large gray eyes
taking in her companion's very bare shoulde