f she had had
an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he
did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot--and if he did,
_a fortiori_, for clearly she is _miserable_. But what a brave child!
How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that _I_ saw
nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!'

Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and
by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had
left London.

Gone! But not without a crisis--that was evident. During the din of
preparation for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings
which it entailed, now at the Varleys', now at the house of some other
connection of his--for the concert was the work of his friends, and
given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel--he had
many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft, indefinable
change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of
sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost
her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been
so marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did
everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was
to his fancy absent and _distraite_, pursuing, through the tumult of
which she was often the central figure, some inner meditations of which
neither he or anyone else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over
the girl's light, self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of
experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she
was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.

Flaxman's guesses as to what had happened came often very near the
truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received
his own conjectures amused himself.

'To think,' he said to himself once with a long breath 'that that
creature was never at a public school, and will go to his death without
any one of the kickings due to him!'

Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude
toward this same 'creature,' toward the man who had released a prize he
had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. _Free_ again--to
be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.

His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly
at present the one thing to be done was to keep his own ambitions
carefully