attempted to
transfer to Miss Nevill's dress; but Vera had only gently pushed back his
hand. "My dear boy, pray keep your gardenia; a flower in one's dress is
such a nuisance, it is always tumbling out."

Denis Wilde, "the boy," as Mrs. Hazeldine called him with a flush on his
fair face, had put it back quietly in his button-hole, too well bred to
show the pain he felt by flinging it, as he would have liked to do, over
the railing, to be trampled under the feet of the horses.

The little group kept its place for some time, the two well-dressed and
good-looking women sitting down, the two or three idlers who stood in
front of them gossiping about nothing at all--last night's ball, to-day's
plans, a little bit of scandal about one passer-by, somebody's rumoured
engagement, somebody else's reported elopement. Denis Wilde stood behind
Vera's chair and listened to it all, the well-known familiar chatter
of a knot of London idlers. There was nothing new or interesting or
entertaining about it. Only a string of names, some of which were strange
to him, but most of which were familiar; and always some little story,
ill-natured or harmless as the case might be, about each name that was
mentioned. And Vera listened, smiling, assenting, but only half
attentive, with her eyes dreamily fixed upon the long procession of
riders passing ever ceaselessly to and fro along the ride.

Suddenly Denis Wilde felt a sudden movement of the chair beneath his
hand. Vera had started violently.

"Here comes Sir John Kynaston," the man before her was saying to his
companion. "What a time it is since he has shown himself; he looks as if
he had had a bad illness."

"Some woman jilted him, I've heard," answered the other man: "some girl
down in the country. People say, Miss Nevill, he is going to die of that
old-fashioned complaint, which you certainly will not believe in, a
broken heart! Poor old boy, he looks as if he had been buried, and had
come up again for a breath of air!"

Vera followed the direction of their eyes. Sir John was walking slowly
towards them; he was thin and careworn; he looked aged beyond all belief.
He walked slowly, as though it were an effort to him, with his eyes upon
the ground. He had not seen her yet; in another minute he would be within
a couple of yards of her. It was next to impossible that he could avoid
seeing her, the centre, as she was, of that noisy, chattering group.

A sort of despair seized her. How was s