erfectly arranged.

Had she talked to many of them? Gregory asked. Had she come across
anybody she liked? Karen shook her head. She had liked them all--to look
at--but it had gone no further than that; she had talked very little
with any of them; and, soberly, unemphatically, she had added: "They
were all too much occupied with Tante--or with each other--to think much
of me. I was the only one not slender and not beautiful!"

Gregory asked who had taken her in to dinner on the two nights, and
masked ironic inner comments when he heard that on Saturday it had been
a young actor who, she thought, had been a little cross at having her as
his portion. "He didn't try to talk to me; nor I to him, when I found
that he was cross," she said. "I didn't like him at all. He had fat
cheeks and very shrewd black eyes." On Sunday it had been a young son of
the house, a boy at Eton. "Very, very dear and nice. We had a great talk
about climbing Swiss mountains, which I have done a good deal, you
know."

Tante, it appeared, had had the ambassador on Saturday and the Duke
himself on Sunday. And she and Tante, as usual, had had great fun in
their own rooms every night, talking everybody over when the day was
done. Karen said nothing to emphasise the contrast between the duke's
friends and Gregory's, but she couldn't have failed to draw her
comparison. Here was a _monde_ where Tante was fully appreciated. That
she herself had not been was not a matter to engage her thoughts. But it
engaged Gregory's. The position in which she had been placed was a
further proof to him of Tante's lack of consideration. Where Karen was
placed depended, precisely, he felt sure of it, on where Madame von
Marwitz wished her to be placed. It was as the little camp-follower that
she had taken her.

After this event came a pause in the fortunes of our young couple.
Madame von Marwitz, with Mrs. Forrester, went to Paris to give her two
concerts there and was gone for a fortnight. In this fortnight he and
Karen resumed, though warily, as it were, some old customs. They read
their political economy again in the evenings when they did not go out,
and he found her at tea-time waiting for him as she had used to do. She
shared his life; she was gentle and thoughtful; yet she had never been
less near. He felt that she guarded herself against admissions. To come
near now would be to grant that it had been Tante's presence that had
parted them.

She wrote to Madame von