ook small notice of him. He regarded, or chose to regard, himself as
a mere 'item'--something systematically overlooked and forgotten in the
bustle of her days and nights. He saw that she thought badly of him,
that the friendship he might have had was now proudly refused him, that
their first week together had left a deep impression of resentment and
hostility in her mind. And all the same he came; and she asked him!
And sometimes, after an hour when she had been more difficult or more
satirical than usual, ending notwithstanding with a little change of
tone, a careless 'You will find us next Wednesday as usual; So-and-so
is coming to play,' Langham would walk home in a state of feeling he did
not care to analyze, but which certainly quickened the pace of life a
good deal. She would not let him try his luck at friendship again, but
in the strangest slightest ways did she not make him suspect every now
and then that he _was_ in some sort important to her, that he sometimes
preoccupied her against her will; that her will, indeed, sometimes
escaped her, and failed to control her manner to him?

It was not only his relations to the beauty, however, his interest
in her career, or his perpetual consciousness of Mrs. Elsmere's cold
dislike and disapproval of his presence in her mother's drawing-room,
that accounted for Langham's heightened mental temperature this winter.
The existence and the proceedings of Mr. Hugh Flaxman had a very
considerable share in it.

'Tell me about Mr. Langham,' said Mr. Flaxman once to Agnes Leyburn,
in the early days of his acquaintance with the family; 'is he an old
friend?'

'Of Robert's,' replied Agnes, her cheerful impenetrable look fixed upon
the speaker. 'My sister met him once for a week in the country at the
Elsmeres'. My mother and I have been only just introduced to him.'

Hugh Flaxman pondered the information a little.

'Does he strike you as--well--what shall we say?--unusual?'

His smile struck one out of her.

'Even Robert might admit that' she said demurely.

'Is Elsmere so attached to him? I own I was provoked just now by his
tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evident physical and
mental strain your brother-in-law had gone through, and he said with a
_nonchalance_ I cannot convey: "Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should
have ventured it. I confess I often wonder whether it was worth while."
"Why?" said I, perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn't know--wouldn't
say. B