‘At Clapham,’ replied Mallinson.

‘I don’t know it.’

‘It’s a suburb to the south-west.’

‘That’s why.’

‘My mother lives there.’

‘I am very sorry.’

The words might have been intended to convey either an apology, or an expression of sympathy with his mother.  Mallinson preferred to take them in the former sense.  ‘I took my wife down there,’ he continued.  ’She wanted more quiet than one can get in London.’

Fielding noticed, however, that Clapham quiet had not materially benefited Mrs. Mallinson.  He commented on her worn appearance to Mrs. Willoughby, when they were seated at the dinner-table.

‘She has been staying, she tells me, with her husband’s people,’ replied Mrs. Willoughby.  ‘I fancy she finds them trying.’

Clarice was placed next to Drake, upon the opposite side to Mrs. Willoughby, and out of ear-shot, and was endeavouring to talk to him indifferently.  ’You never take a holiday, I suppose.  Where are you going this year?’ she asked.

‘To Matanga,’ said Drake.

‘Matanga!  Oh no.’  The words slipped from her lips before she was able to check them.

‘I think that my place is there,’ returned Drake, ’at all events for the moment.  I shall go as soon as the House rises.’

‘I thought you didn’t mean to leave London again.’

’One gets over ideas of that kind.  After all, my interests lie in Matanga, and one gets a kind of affection for the place which makes your fortune.’

The recantation was uttered with sufficient awkwardness.  But Clarice was too engrossed in her own thoughts to notice his embarrassment.  ’Do you remember when I first met you?’ she asked.  ’It was at a performance of Frou-Frou.’

‘I remember quite well,’ said he.  ‘I was rather struck with the play.’

‘I have been reading it lately.’

Drake started at the significant tone in which the words were spoken.  ‘Really?’ he said, with an uneasy laugh.  ’What impressed me was that scene at Venice, where Gilberte and De Valreas read over the list of plays in the Paris newspapers, and realise what they have thrown away, and for how little.  It seemed to me the saddest scene I had ever witnessed.’

‘Yes,’ interposed Clarice quickly.  ’But because Paris and its theatres meant so much to them.  I remember what you said, that everything in the play seemed so true just to those characters, Gilberte and De Valreas.’

She glanced at him as she uttered the last name.  Drake understood that she was drawing a distinction between him and the fashionable lounger of the play.

‘Besides,’ she went on, dropping her voice, ’Gilberte left a child behind her.  Her unhappiness turned on that.’

’In a way, no doubt, but the loss of friends, station, home, counts for something—­for enough to destroy her liking for De Valreas at all events.’

‘For De Valreas!’ insisted Clarice.  ‘He was not worth the sacrifice.’  She paused for a moment, and then continued diffidently.  ’There’s something else; I hardly like to tell you it.  You wouldn’t notice it from seeing the play.  I didn’t; but it came to me when I read the book.  I think the play’s absolutely untrue, yes, even to those characters, in one respect.’