every time she entered a ball-room, or to look up shudderingly each
time the door was opened and a fresh guest announced at a dinner-party.
She never met either of them, nor did the name of Kynaston ever strike
upon her ear.

She told herself that she had forgotten the two brothers, whose fate had
seemed at one time so intimately bound up with her own--the one as well
as the other. They were nothing more to her now--they had passed away out
of her life. Henceforth she had entered upon a new course, in which her
beauty and her mother wit were to exact their full value, but in which
her heart was to count for nothing more. It was to be smothered up within
her. That, together with all the best, and sweetest, and truest part of
her, once awakened for a brief space by the magic touch of love, was now
to be extinguished within her as though they had never been.

Meanwhile Vera enjoys herself.

She looks happy enough now as she sits by her friend's side in the park,
with a little knot of admirers about her; not taking very much trouble to
talk to them, indeed, but smiling serenely from one to the other, letting
herself be talked to and amused, with just a word here and there, to show
them she is listening to what they say. It is, perhaps, the secret of her
success that she is so thoroughly indifferent to it all. It matters so
little to her whether they come or go; there is so little eagerness about
her, so perfect an _insouciance_ of manner. Other women lay themselves
out to attract and to be admired; Vera only sits still, and waits with a
certain queenliness of manner for the worship that is laid at her feet,
and which she receives as her due.

Behind her, with his hand on the back of her chair, stands a young fellow
of about two or three and twenty; he does not speak to her much, nor join
in the merry, empty chatter that is going on around her; but it is easy
to see by the way he looks down at her, by the fashion in which he
watches her slightest movement, that Vera exercises no ordinary influence
over him.

He is a tall, slight-figured boy, with very fair yellow hair and delicate
features; his blue eyes are frank and pleasant, but his mouth is a trifle
weak and vacillating, and the lips are too sensitively cut for strength
of character, whilst his chest is too narrow for strength of body. He is
carefully dressed, and wears a white, heavy-scented flower in his coat,
a flower which, five minutes ago, he had ineffectually