to put to him a question
which, from the ardor with which she announced it, had evidently been
pressing for utterance for some time past.

"Oh, Trevor, please tell me, what was the date of the first performance
of 'Hamlet'?"

In order to answer her Mr. Hilbery had to have recourse to the exact
scholarship of William Rodney, and before he had given his excellent
authorities for believing as he believed, Rodney felt himself admitted
once more to the society of the civilized and sanctioned by the
authority of no less a person than Shakespeare himself. The power of
literature, which had temporarily deserted Mr. Hilbery, now came back to
him, pouring over the raw ugliness of human affairs its soothing
balm, and providing a form into which such passions as he had felt so
painfully the night before could be molded so that they fell roundly
from the tongue in shapely phrases, hurting nobody. He was sufficiently
sure of his command of language at length to look at Katharine and again
at Denham. All this talk about Shakespeare had acted as a soporific, or
rather as an incantation upon Katharine. She leaned back in her chair at
the head of the tea-table, perfectly silent, looking vaguely past
them all, receiving the most generalized ideas of human heads against
pictures, against yellow-tinted walls, against curtains of deep crimson
velvet. Denham, to whom he turned next, shared her immobility under his
gaze. But beneath his restraint and calm it was possible to detect a
resolution, a will, set now with unalterable tenacity, which made such
turns of speech as Mr. Hilbery had at command appear oddly irrelevant.
At any rate, he said nothing. He respected the young man; he was a very
able young man; he was likely to get his own way. He could, he thought,
looking at his still and very dignified head, understand Katharine's
preference, and, as he thought this, he was surprised by a pang of acute
jealousy. She might have married Rodney without causing him a twinge.
This man she loved. Or what was the state of affairs between them? An
extraordinary confusion of emotion was beginning to get the better of
him, when Mrs. Hilbery, who had been conscious of a sudden pause in the
conversation, and had looked wistfully at her daughter once or twice,
remarked:

"Don't stay if you want to go, Katharine. There's the little room over
there. Perhaps you and Ralph--"

"We're engaged," said Katharine, waking with a start, and looking
straight at