ith a smile that there was no inference to be drawn from that not
unusual attitude of hers. It did not follow that she was bored or filled
with discontent. She might simply be oblivious. A remark made about her
by some forgotten person who had asked a question and received no answer
came back to Linforth and called a smile to his face. "You might imagine
that Violet Oliver is thinking of the angels. She is probably considering
whether she should run upstairs and powder her nose."

Linforth began to look for other signs; and it seemed to him that the
world had gone well with her. She had a kind of settled look, almost a
sleekness, as though anxiety never came near to her pillow. She had
married, surely, and married well. The jewels she wore were evidence, and
Linforth began to speculate which of the party was her husband. They were
young people who were gathered at the table. In her liking for young
people about her she had not changed. Of the men no one was noticeable,
but Violet Oliver, as he remembered, would hardly have chosen a
noticeable man. She would have chosen someone with great wealth and no
ambitions, one who was young enough to ask nothing more from the world
than Violet Oliver, who would not, in a word, trouble her with a career.
She might have chosen anyone of her companions. And then her eyes
travelled round the room and met his.

For a moment she gazed at him, not seeing him at all. In a moment or two
consciousness came to her. Her brows went up in astonishment. Then she
smiled and waved her hand to him across the room--gaily, without a trace
of embarrassment, without even the colour rising to her cheeks. Thus
might one greet a casual friend of yesterday. Linforth bethought him,
with a sudden sting of bitterness which surprised him by its sharpness,
of the postscript in the last of the few letters she had written to him.
That letter was still vivid enough in his memories for him to be able to
see the pages, to recognise the writing, and read the sentences.

"I shall always think of the little dreams we had together of our future,
and regret that I couldn't know them. That will always be in my mind.
Remember that!"

How much of that postscript remained true, he wondered, after these three
years. Very little, it seemed. Linforth fell to speculating, with an
increasing interest, as to which of the men at her table she had mated
with. Was it the tall youth with the commonplace good looks opposite to
her?