‘Do you let him talk to you about the colour of your eyes?’ Fielding was really indignant at the supposition.

‘He didn’t ask my permission,’ Mrs. Willoughby said penitently.  ’But it isn’t a thing people ought to do.  He said they were gray, and they aren’t, are they?’ She turned her face towards him.

‘Gray?  Of course not,’ said Fielding, and starting from his chair, he approached Mrs. Willoughby at the window to make sure.

‘Clarice’s are, I know, but I am certain mine aren’t.’  She held up her face towards the light, and the remark was pitched as a question.

‘Yours,’ said Fielding, examining them, ’Neptune dipped them in the sea at six o’clock on an August morning.’

Mrs. Willoughby moved away from the window precipitately.  ’So, if Mr. Mallinson is so fond of Clarice,’ she said, ’that he sees her in everybody one can’t help pitying him.’

Mrs. Willoughby, however, for a short time subsequently was not seen in the company of the discarded lover, and Fielding inferred with satisfaction that her pity was taking a less active form.  He was roused to a perception that his inference was false one night at the opera.

Mrs. Willoughby was present with Mr. Le Mesurier and Clarice.  Percy Conway he hardly reckoned, counting him at this time, from his constant attendance, rather as an item of Clarice’s toilette; and Fielding took care to descend the staircase after the performance in close proximity to the party.

‘And how’s Mr. Mallinson?’ he asked of Mrs. Willoughby, not without a certain complacency in his voice.

‘Oh, poor boy!’ she replied with the tenderest sympathy, ’he’s in bed, ill.’

‘Ill?’ asked Clarice quickly.  ‘You don’t mean that.’

‘Yes.  I’m so concerned.  He wrote to tell me all about it.’

Fielding looked displeased, and much the same expression was to be seen on the face of Clarice.  Mrs. Willoughby was serenely unconscious of the effect of her words.

‘I heard that he was in bed,’ interposed Conway carelessly.  ’But apparently he has got something to console himself with.’

‘Yes.  He wrote to me about that too,’ said Mrs. Willoughby.  ’Fancy, Clarice!  He has inherited quite a good income.  An uncle or somebody left it to him.’

Clarice expressed an acid satisfaction at the news.  She dropped behind with Fielding.

‘You didn’t know that Mr. Mallinson was ill?’ she asked.  ’Did none of his friends know except Connie?’ and then there was a perceptible accent of pique in her voice.

Fielding did not answer the question immediately.  He had been brought of a sudden to the vexatious conclusion that Mrs. Willoughby was a coquette just like the rest of her trivial sex—­no better, indeed, than the girl at his side, whose first anxiety was not as to whether Mallinson was seriously ill, but why he wrote the information to Mrs. Willoughby.  He felt that Mrs. Willoughby had no right to trifle with Mallinson.  The poor fellow had already suffered his full share of that kind of experience.