ether it was just the sight of Kerr himself as he sat there that
stirred her, she didn't try to distinguish.

"But suppose he was your own thief," she urged; "took your own things, I
mean," she hastily amended, "and suppose he turned out to be--some one
you knew and liked--" She hesitated. She had come at last to what she
really wanted to say. She had brought out a question that had been
teasing her fancy at intervals all the while he had been talking, and he
hadn't even heard it. He wasn't even looking at her. She had caught him
off his guard. He was looking across her shoulder straight down the dim
vista of the room to the little blaze of bordering light. He was looking
at Harry. No, Harry was looking at him. Harry was looking with a steady,
an intent gaze, and Kerr meeting it--it might have been merely the blank
glare of his monocle--seemed, to Flora, to meet it a little insolently.
She fancied in the instant something to pass between the two men,
something which, this time, she did not mistake for jealousy--a shade
too dim for defiance or suspicion, a deep scrutiny that struggled to
place something, some one.

Flora felt a sudden wish to break that curious scrutiny. It had broken
her little moment. It had shattered the personal, almost intimate note
that had been sounded between them. The look Kerr turned back to her was
vague, and stirred in her a dim resentment that he could drop it all so
easily.

"Shall we join the others?" It was the voice with which she had begun
with him, but her eyes were hot through their light mist of lashes, and
he threw her a comprehending glance of amusement.

"Oh, no," he assured her, "we can't help ourselves. They are going to
join us."

Ella Buller, in the van of her procession, was already descending upon
them. Her approach dissipated the last remnant of their personal moment.
Her presence always insisted that there was nothing worth while but
instant participation in her geniality, and whatever subject it might at
the moment be taken up with. This conviction of Ella's had been wont to
overawe Flora, and it still overwhelmed her; so that now, as she
followed in the tail of Ella's marshaled force, she had a guilty feeling
that there should be nothing in her mind but a normal desire for supper.

Yet all the way down the great stair, "the Corridors of Time," where the
white owl glared his glassy wisdom on the passings and counter-passings,
she was haunted with the thought that Ha