of a close grip
sometimes. It ended a handshake neither could withdraw from gracefully.
"Good-bye, Mr. Torrens," she said, and contrived another laugh. "I'll
come again to talk about the poetry. I _must_ go now." She passed Irene,
coming in from a moment's speech with the nurse outside, with a hurried
farewell, and ran on to her mother's room breathless.

CHAPTER XIX

GWEN'S PESSIMISM. IT WAS ALL OUR FAULT! HOW SHE KNEW THAT ADRIAN
TORRENS WAS FIANCE, AND HOW HER MOTHER TOOK KINDLY TO THE IDEA.
PEOPLE ONLY KNOW WHAT THE WILL OF GOD IS, NOT WHAT IT ISN'T. BUT
ADRIAN TORRENS DID _NOT_ COME TO TABLE. LONELINESS, AND NIGHT--ALL
BUT SLEEPLESS. WANT OF COMMON SENSE. THE FATE OF A FEATHER.
COUNTING A THOUSAND. LOOKING MATTERS CALMLY IN THE FACE. A GREAT
DECISION, AND WHAT GWEN SAW IN A MIRROR

Lady Ancester, not sorry to get away from a position which involved the
consideration that she was unreasonable in feeling reluctance to remain
in it, endeavoured on arriving in her own room to congratulate herself
on her own share in an embarrassing interview.

She had got through it very well certainly, but not so well as she had
been led to expect by her meeting with his father three weeks since. She
had had her misgivings before that interview, and had been pleasantly
surprised to find how thoroughly the inexorable present had ridden
rough-shod over the half-forgotten past. Their old identities had
vanished, and it was possible to be civil and courteous, and that sort
of thing; even to send messages of sympathy, quite in earnest, to the
lady who up till now had been little more than the Miss Abercrombie
Hamilton Torrens married. Being thus set at ease about what seemed rocks
of embarrassment ahead, in the father's case, Lady Ancester had looked
forward with perfect equanimity to making the acquaintance of the
son--had, in fact, only connected him in her mind with this deplorable
accident, which, however, she quite understood to be going to be a thing
of the past. All in good time. Her equanimity had, however, been
disturbed by the young man's inherited manner, which his father had so
completely lost; above all things by his rapid nonsense, one of his
father's leading characteristics in youth. She condemned it as more
nonsensical, which probably only meant that she herself was older. But
the manner--the manner of it! How it brought back Clarges Street and her
mother, and the family earth