and think it sufficient to leave her with the
footman. Their common consciousness that she was a kind of cousin, a
consciousness not devoid of satisfaction, was quite consistent with a
view, early arrived at, of the absurdity of any fuss about her.

III

When Mr. Brookenham appeared his wife was prompt. "She's coming back for
Lord Petherton."

"Oh!" he simply said.

"There's something between them."

"Oh!" he merely repeated. And it would have taken many such sounds on
his part to represent a spirit of response discernible to any one but
his mate.

"There have been things before," she went on, "but I haven't felt sure.
Don't you know how one has sometimes a flash?"

It couldn't be said of Edward Brookenham, who seemed to bend for sitting
down more hinges than most men, that he looked as if he knew either this
or anything else. He had a pale cold face, marked and made regular, made
even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly,
there was no significance, no accent. Clean-shaven, slightly bald, with
unlighted grey eyes and a mouth that gave the impression of not working
easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master. Lean
moreover and stiff, and with the air of having here and there in his
person a bone or two more than his share, he had once or twice, at
fancy-balls, been thought striking in a dress copied from one of
Holbein's English portraits. But when once some such meaning as that had
been put into him it took a long time to put another, a longer time than
even his extreme exposure or anybody's study of the problem had yet made
possible. If anything particular had finally been expected from him it
might have been a summary or an explanation of the things he had always
not said; but there was something in him that had long since pacified
all impatience, drugged all curiosity. He had never in his life answered
such a question as his wife had just put him and which she would
not have put had she feared a reply. So dry and decent and even
distinguished did he look, as if he had positively been created to
meet a propriety and match some other piece, that lady, with her famous
perceptions, would no more have appealed to him seriously on a
general proposition than she would, for such a response, have rung the
drawing-room bell. He was none the less held to have a great promiscuous
wisdom. "What is it that's between them?" he demanded.

"What's between any woman and the man sh