self up. 'Not _fun_,' he said impressively, 'not fun.
Thought-reading wants seriousness; the most tremendous things depend
upon it. If established it will revolutionise our whole views of life.
Even a Huxley could not deny that!'

She studied him with mocking eyes. 'Do you imagine this party to-night
looks very serious?'

His face fell.

'One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,' he admitted,
sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous young man.
Why was he not cricketing or shooting or exploring, or using the muscles
Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead
of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other people's
night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go away?

'Come, Mr. Denman,' said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; 'the audience
is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!' and he gave Langham a
cool greeting. 'Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings
with the devil?'

'Nothing. Are you a believer?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 'I never refuse an experiment of any
kind,' he added with an odd change of voice. 'Come, Denman.'

And the two went off. Langham came to a stand beside Rose, while old
Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the
Queen's Speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all
elderly men.

They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine
shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young
emotion, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she noticed
none of that change which had struck Agnes.

And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man's silence! An
hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him
to Lady Charlotte's that night. And yet here he was, riveted to her
side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her
loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of
her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the
teasing difficult creature of the last few months.

At Murewell his chagrin had been _not_ to feel, _not_ to struggle, to
have been cheated out of experience. Well, here _is_ the experience in
good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how
little the exquisite child beside him knows of it, or of the man on whom
she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangel