ng the excuse she had offered to Alice, but in this case it was
impossible to decline. Stella assured her that the party would be small,
and would be sure to comprise none but really interesting people. It was
so, in fact. Two men whom, on arriving, they found in the drawing-room
Adela knew by fame, and the next to enter was a lady whose singing
she had heard with rapture at a concert on the evening before. She was
talking with this lady when a new announcement fell upon her ear, a name
which caused her to start and gaze towards the door. Impossible for
her to guard against this display of emotion; the name she heard so
distinctly seemed an unreal utterance, a fancy of her brain, or else
it belonged to another than the one she knew. But there was no such
illusion; he whom she saw enter was assuredly Hubert Eldon.

A few hot seconds only seemed to intervene before she was called upon to
acknowledge him, for Mrs. Boscobel was presenting him to her.

'I have had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Mutimer before,' Hubert said
as soon as he saw that Adela in voice and look recognised their
acquaintance.

Mrs. Boscobel was evidently surprised. She herself had met Hubert at the
house of an artist in Rome more than a year ago, but the details of his
life were unknown to her. Subsequently, in London, she happened once
to get on the subject of Socialism with him, and told him, as an
interesting story, what she heard from the Westlakes about Richard
Mutimer. Hubert admitted knowledge of the facts, and made the remark
about the valley of Wanley which Mrs. Boscobel repeated at Exmouth, but
he revealed nothing more. Having no marriageable daughter, Mrs. Boscobel
was under no necessity of searching into his antecedents. He was one of
ten or a dozen young men of possible future whom she liked to have about
her.

Hubert seated himself by Adela, and there was a moment of inevitable
silence.

'I saw you as soon as I got into the room,' he said, in the desperate
necessity for speech of some kind. 'I thought I must have been mistaken;
I was so unprepared to meet you here.'

Adela replied that she was staying with Mrs. Westlake.

'I don't know her,' said Hubert, 'and am very anxious to Boscobel's
portrait of her--I saw it in the studio just before it went away--was a
wonderful thing.'

This was necessarily said in a low tone; it seemed to establish
confidence between them.

Adela experienced a sudden and strange calm; in a world so enti