Westover was going to the tea at Mrs. Bellingham's. He said he had to
look in there, before he went out to Cambridge; and left Westover in mute
amaze at the length he had apparently gone in a road that had once seemed
no thoroughfare for him. Jeff's social acceptance, even after the Enderby
ball, which was now some six or seven weeks past, had been slow; but of
late, for no reason that he or any one else could have given, it had
gained a sudden precipitance; and people who wondered why they met him at
other houses began to ask him to their own.

He did not care to go to their houses, and he went at first in the hope
of seeing Bessie Lynde again. But this did not happen for some time, and
it was a mid-Lenten tea that brought them together. As soon as he caught
sight of her he went up to her and began to talk as if they had been in
the habit of meeting constantly. She could not control a little start at
his approach, and he frankly recognized it.

"What's the matter?"

"Oh--the window!"

"It isn't open," he said, trying it. "Do you want to try it yourself?"

"I think I can trust you," she answered, but she sank a little into the
shelter of the curtains, not to be seen talking with him, perhaps, or not
to be interrupted--she did not analyze her motive closely.

He remained talking to her until she went away, and then he contrived to
go with her. She did not try to escape him after that; each time they met
she had the pleasure of realizing that there had never been any danger of
what never happened. But beyond this she could perhaps have given no
better reason for her willingness to meet him again and again than the
bewildered witnesses of the fact. In her set people not only never
married outside of it, but they never flirted outside of it. For one of
themselves, even for a girl like Bessie, whom they had not quite known
from childhood, to be apparently amusing herself with a man like that, so
wholly alien in origin, in tradition, was something unheard of; and it
began to look as if Bessie Lynde was more than amused. It seemed to Mary
Enderby that wherever she went she saw that man talking to Bessie. She
could have believed that it was by some evil art that he always contrived
to reach Bessie's side, if anything could have been less like any kind of
art than the bold push he made for her as soon as he saw her in a room.
But sometimes Miss Enderby feared that it was Bessie who used such
finesse as there was, and alway