standing sunshine, the eager air, and lively bumping of the
descent, Henrietta observed the flush fade, leaving the girl white as
milk. Her eyes looked positively enormous set in the pallor of her face.
They were veiled, telling nothing, and thereby--to Mrs. Frayling's
thinking--betraying much. She scented a situation--some girlish
attachment, budding affair of the heart.

"My father gave Tom Verity letters of introduction, and he wanted us to
know how kindly he had been received in consequence."

"Most proper on his part," Mrs. Frayling said.

She debated discreet questioning, probing--the establishment of herself
in the character of sympathetic confidante. But decided against that. It
might be impolitic, dangerous even, to press the pace. Moreover the young
man, whatever his attractions, might be held a negligible quantity in as
far as any little schemes of her own were concerned at present, long
leave and reappearance upon the home scene being almost certainly years
distant.--And, just there, the hand within the muff became responsive
once more, even urgent in its seeking and pressure, as though appealing
for attention and tenderness.

"Henrietta, I don't want to be selfish, but won't you go on telling me
stories about your Thursday party people?--I interrupted you--but it's
all new, you see, and it interests me so much," Damaris rather
plaintively said.

Mrs. Frayling needed no further inducement to exercise her really
considerable powers of verbal delineation. Charging her palette with
lively colours, she sprang to the task--and that with a sprightly
composure and deftness of touch which went far to cloak malice and rob
flippancy of offence.

Listening, Damaris brightened--as the adroit performer intended she
should--under the gay cascade of talk. Laughed at length, letting finer
instincts of charity go by the wall, in her enjoyment of neatly turned
mockeries and the sense of personal superiority they provoked. For
Henrietta's dissection of the weaknesses of absent friends, inevitably
amounted to indirect flattery of the friend for whose diversion that
process of dissection was carried out.

She passed the whole troop in review.--To begin with Miss Maud Callowgas,
in permanent waiting upon her ex-semi-episcopal widowed mother--in age a
real thirty-five though nominal twenty-eight, her muddy complexion,
prominent teeth and all too long back.--Her designs, real or imagined,
upon Marshall Wace. Designs foredoo