s."

From her own bedroom door she called up.

"Mathilde, what is the name of your young friend?"

There was a little pause before Mathilde answered that she was sorry, but
she didn't know.

Mrs. Farron turned to her husband and made a little gesture to indicate
that this ignorance on the girl's part did not bear out his theory; but
she saw that he did not admit it, that he clung still to his
impression. "And Vincent's impressions--" she said to herself as she
went in to dress.

CHAPTER III

Mr. Lanley was ruffled as he left his daughter's drawing-room.

"As if I had wanted her to marry at eighteen," he said to himself; and
he took his hat crossly from Pringle and set it hard on his head at the
slight angle which he preferred. Then reflecting that Pringle was not
in any way involved, he unbent slightly, and said something that
sounded like:

"Haryer, Pringle?"

Pringle, despite his stalwart masculine appearance, had in speaking a
surprisingly high, squeaky voice.

"I keep my health, thank you, sir," he said. "Anna has been somewhat
ailing." Anna was his wife, to whom he usually referred as "Mrs.
Pringle"; but he made an exception in speaking to Mr. Lanley, for she had
once been the Lanleys' kitchen-maid. "Your car, sir?"

No, Mr. Lanley was walking--walking, indeed, more quickly than usual
under the stimulus of annoyance.

Nothing had ever happened that made him suffer as he had suffered through
his daughter's divorce. Divorce was one of the modern ideas which he had
imagined he had accepted. As a lawyer he had expressed himself as willing
always to take the lady's side; but in the cases which he actually took
he liked to believe that the wife was perfect and the husband
inexcusable. He could not comfort himself with any such belief in his
daughter's case.

Adelaide's conduct had been, as far as he could see, irreproachable; but,
then, so had Severance's. This was what had made the gossip, almost the
scandal, of the thing. Even his sister Alberta had whispered to him that
if Severance had been unfaithful to Adelaide--But poor Severance had not
been unfaithful; he had not even become indifferent. He loved his wife,
he said, as much as on the day he married her. He was extremely unhappy.
Mr. Lanley grew to dread the visits of his huge, blond son-in-law, who
used actually to sob in the library, and ask for explanations of
something which Mr. Lanley had never been able to understand.

And how obst