leasure in the planning of some
double-edged congratulations.

Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale tired girl,
who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and
said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.

His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way
up to her, and was her watchful unobtrusive guardian for the rest of the
afternoon.

He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient
conjecture.

'As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she had had
an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he
did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot--and if he did,
_a fortiori_, for clearly she is _miserable_. But what a brave child!
How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that _I_ saw
nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!'

Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and
by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had
left London.

Gone! But not without a crisis--that was evident. During the din of
preparations for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings which
it entailed, now at the Varleys', now at the house of some other
connection of his--for the concert was the work of his friends, and
given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel--he had
many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft indefinable
change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of
sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost
her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been so
marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did
everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was
to his fancy absent and _distraite_, pursuing through the tumult of
which she was often the central figure some inner meditations of which
neither he nor any one else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over
the girl's light self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of
experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she
was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.

Flaxman's guesses as to what had happened came often very near the
truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received
his own conjectures amused himself.

'To think,' he said to himself on