hout a motive," he remarked.

"Oh, Hirst," said Helen.

"Hirst and Hewet, they're all the same to me--all covered with spots,"
he replied. "He advises her to read Gibbon. Did you know that?"

Helen did not know that, but she would not allow herself inferior to her
husband in powers of observation. She merely said:

"Nothing would surprise me. Even that dreadful flying man we met at the
dance--even Mr. Dalloway--even--"

"I advise you to be circumspect," said Ridley. "There's Willoughby,
remember--Willoughby"; he pointed at a letter.

Helen looked with a sigh at an envelope which lay upon her
dressing-table. Yes, there lay Willoughby, curt, inexpressive,
perpetually jocular, robbing a whole continent of mystery, enquiring
after his daughter's manners and morals--hoping she wasn't a bore, and
bidding them pack her off to him on board the very next ship if she
were--and then grateful and affectionate with suppressed emotion, and
then half a page about his own triumphs over wretched little natives who
went on strike and refused to load his ships, until he roared English
oaths at them, "popping my head out of the window just as I was, in my
shirt sleeves. The beggars had the sense to scatter."

"If Theresa married Willoughby," she remarked, turning the page with a
hairpin, "one doesn't see what's to prevent Rachel--"

But Ridley was now off on grievances of his own connected with the
washing of his shirts, which somehow led to the frequent visits of
Hughling Elliot, who was a bore, a pedant, a dry stick of a man, and yet
Ridley couldn't simply point at the door and tell him to go. The truth
of it was, they saw too many people. And so on and so on, more conjugal
talk pattering softly and unintelligibly, until they were both ready to
go down to tea.

The first thing that caught Helen's eye as she came downstairs was a
carriage at the door, filled with skirts and feathers nodding on the
tops of hats. She had only time to gain the drawing-room before two
names were oddly mispronounced by the Spanish maid, and Mrs. Thornbury
came in slightly in advance of Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing.

"Mrs. Wilfrid Flushing," said Mrs. Thornbury, with a wave of her hand.
"A friend of our common friend Mrs. Raymond Parry."

Mrs. Flushing shook hands energetically. She was a woman of forty
perhaps, very well set up and erect, splendidly robust, though not as
tall as the upright carriage of her body made her appear.

She looked Helen straigh