stence
which one divined to have been both dependent and desultory, he had
preserved a sense of wider relations and acquired a smattering of
information to which he applied his only independent faculty, that of
clear thought. He could talk intelligently and not too inaccurately of
the larger questions which Lynbrook ignored, and a gay indifference to
the importance of money seemed the crowning grace of his nature, till
Amherst suddenly learned that this attitude of detachment was generally
ascribed to the liberality of Mrs. Fenton Carbury. "Everybody knows she
married Fenton to provide for Ned," some one let fall in the course of
one of the smoking-room dissertations on which the host of Lynbrook had
such difficulty in fixing his attention; and the speaker's
matter-of-course tone, and the careless acquiescence of his hearers,
were more offensive to Amherst than the fact itself. In the first flush
of his disgust he classed the story as one of the lies bred in the
malarious air of after-dinner gossip; but gradually he saw that, whether
true or not, it had sufficient circulation to cast a shade of ambiguity
on the persons concerned. Bessy alone seemed deaf to the rumours about
her friend. There was something captivating to her in Mrs. Carbury's
slang and noise, in her defiance of decorum and contempt of criticism.
"I like Blanche because she doesn't pretend," was Bessy's vague
justification of the lady; but in reality she was under the mysterious
spell which such natures cast over the less venturesome imaginations of
their own sex.

Amherst at first tried to deaden himself to the situation, as part of
the larger coil of miseries in which he found himself; but all his
traditions were against such tolerance, and they were roused to revolt
by the receipt of a newspaper clipping, sent by an anonymous hand,
enlarging on the fact that the clandestine meetings of a fashionable
couple were being facilitated by the connivance of a Long Island
_chatelaine_. Amherst, hot from the perusal of this paragraph, sprang
into the first train, and laid the clipping before his father-in-law,
who chanced to be passing through town on his way from the Hudson to the
Hot Springs.

Mr. Langhope, ensconced in the cushioned privacy of the reading-room at
the Amsterdam Club, where he had invited his son-in-law to meet him,
perused the article with the cool eye of the collector to whom a new
curiosity is offered.

"I suppose," he mused, "that in th