dwelt simply in his making one so forget that he was no more than a patched urchin.  If one dealt with him on a different basis one’s misadventures were one’s own fault.  So Pemberton waited in a queer confusion of yearning and alarm for the catastrophe which was held to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he certainly at moments felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he wondered much in what form it would find its liveliest effect.

Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal—­a frightened sauve qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners.  Certainly they were less elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for something they didn’t find.  The Dorringtons hadn’t re-appeared, the princes had scattered; wasn’t that the beginning of the end?  Mrs. Moreen had lost her reckoning of the famous “days”; her social calendar was blurred—­it had turned its face to the wall.  Pemberton suspected that the great, the cruel discomfiture had been the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who seemed not to know what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they wanted.  He kept sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his retreat, which was never the path of a return.  Flowers were all very well, but—­Pemberton could complete the proposition.  It was now positively conspicuous that in the long run the Moreens were a social failure; so that the young man was almost grateful the run had not been short.  Mr. Moreen indeed was still occasionally able to get away on business and, what was more surprising, was likewise able to get back.  Ulick had no club but you couldn’t have discovered it from his appearance, which was as much as ever that of a person looking at life from the window of such an institution; therefore Pemberton was doubly surprised at an answer he once heard him make his mother in the desperate tone of a man familiar with the worst privations.  Her question Pemberton had not quite caught; it appeared to be an appeal for a suggestion as to whom they might get to take Amy.  “Let the Devil take her!” Ulick snapped; so that Pemberton could see that they had not only lost their amiability but had ceased to believe in themselves.  He could also see that if Mrs. Moreen was trying to get people to take her children she might be regarded as closing the hatches for the storm.  But Morgan would be the last she would part with.

One winter afternoon—­it was a Sunday—­he and the boy walked far together in the Bois de Boulogne.  The evening was so splendid, the cold lemon-coloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and pedestrians so amusing and the fascination of Paris so great, that they stayed out later than usual and became aware that they should have to hurry home to arrive in time for dinner.  They hurried accordingly, arm-in-arm, good-humoured and hungry, agreeing that there was nothing like Paris after all and that after everything too that had come and gone they were not yet sated