him a most preposterous young man.
Why was he not cricketing, or shooting, or exploring, or using the
muscles Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose,
instead of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other
people's night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go
away?

'Come, Mr. Denman,' said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; 'the audience
is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!' and he gave Langham a
cool greeting. 'Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings
with the devil!'

'Nothing. Are you a believer?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 'I never refuse an experiment of any
kind,' he added with an odd change of voice. Come, Denman.'

And the two went off. Langham came to stand beside Rose, while Lord
Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the
Queen's speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all
elderly men.

They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine
shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young
emotions, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she
noticed none of that change which had struck Agnes.

And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man's silence! An
hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him
to Lady Charlotte's that night. And yet here he was, riveted to
her side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her
loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of
her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the
teasing difficult creature of the last few months.

At Murewell, his chagrin had been _not_ to feel, _not_ to struggle, to
have been cheated out of experience. Well, here is the experience in
good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how
little the exquisite child beside him knows of it or of the man on whom
she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangely exulting
in her own strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and
eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside her
is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance.

The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder and
its detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the turn of
card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other forms of
telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended t