exclaimed. "You're right, Lucy! Little girl, you're quite
right! What's the good of it! Upon my word, you're a most practical
woman!--you'll make a capital wife for a business man!" Then as the gay
music of the band below-stairs suddenly ceased, to give place to the
noise of chattering voices and murmurs of laughter, he glanced at his
watch.

"Supper-time!" he said. "Let me take you down. And after supper, will
you give me ten minutes' chat with you alone in the library!"

She looked up eagerly, with a flush of pink in her cheeks.

"Of course I will! With pleasure!"

"Thank you!" And he drew her white-gloved hand through his arm. "I am
leaving town next week, and I have something important to say to you
before I go. You will allow me to say it privately?"

She smiled assent, and leaned on his arm with a light, confiding
pressure, to which he no more responded than if his muscles had been
rigid iron. Her heart beat quickly with a sense of gratified vanity and
exultant expectancy,--but his throbbed slowly and heavily, chilled by
the double frost of age and solitude.

CHAPTER III

To see people eating is understood to be a very interesting and
"brilliant" spectacle, and however insignificant you may be in the
social world, you get a reflex of its "brilliancy" when you allow people
in their turn to see you eating likewise. A well-cooked, well-served
supper is a "function," in which every man and woman who can move a jaw
takes part, and though in plain parlance there is nothing uglier than
the act of putting food into one's mouth, we have persuaded ourselves
that it is a pretty and pleasant performance enough for us to ask our
friends to see us do it. Byron's idea that human beings should eat
privately and apart, was not altogether without aesthetic justification,
though according to medical authority such a procedure would be very
injurious to health. The slow mastication of a meal in the presence of
cheerful company is said to promote healthy digestion--moreover, custom
and habit make even the most incongruous things acceptable, therefore
the display of tables, crowded with food-stuffs and surrounded by
eating, drinking, chattering and perspiring men and women, does not
affect us to any sense of the ridiculous or the unseemly. On the
contrary, when some of us see such tables, we exclaim "How lovely!" or
"How delightful!" according to our own pet vocabulary, or to our
knowledge of the humour of our host or h