h get
along, you gypsy!"

"She's always up to something," Dashwood laughed as Miriam, radiant and
with a conscious stage tread, glided toward Sherringham as if she were
coming to the footlights. He rose slowly from his seat, looking at her
and struck with her beauty: he had been impatient to see her, yet in the
act his impatience had had a disconcerting check.

He had had time to note that the man who had come in with her was
Gabriel Nash, and this recognition brought a low sigh to his lips as he
held out his hand to her--a sigh expressive of the sudden sense that his
interest in her now could only be a gross community. Of course that
didn't matter, since he had set it, at the most, such rigid limits; but
he none the less felt vividly reminded that it would be public and
notorious, that inferior people would be inveterately mixed up with it,
that she had crossed the line and sold herself to the vulgar, making him
indeed only one of an equalised multitude. The way Nash turned up there
just when he didn't want to see him proved how complicated a thing it
was to have a friendship with a young woman so clearly booked for
renown. He quite forgot that the intruder had had this object of
interest long before his own first view of it and had been present at
that passage, which he had in a measure brought about. Had Sherringham
not been so cut out to make trouble of this particular joy he might have
found some adequate assurance that their young hostess distinguished him
in the way in which, taking his hand in both of hers, she looked up at
him and murmured, "Dear old master!" Then as if this were not
acknowledgment enough she raised her head still higher and, whimsically,
gratefully, charmingly, almost nobly, kissed him on the lips before the
other men, before the good mother whose "Oh you honest creature!" made
everything regular.

XXXI

If he was ruffled by some of her conditions there was thus comfort and
consolation to be drawn from others, beside the essential
fascination--so small the doubt of that now--of the young lady's own
society. He spent the afternoon, they all spent the afternoon, and the
occasion reminded him of pages in _Wilhelm Meister_. He himself could
pass for Wilhelm, and if Mrs. Rooth had little resemblance to Mignon,
Miriam was remarkably like Philina. The movable feast awaiting
them--luncheon, tea, dinner?--was delayed two or three hours; but the
interval was a source of gaiety, for they all