They passed down the room together a few moments later, the Marchioness wonderfully dressed in a gown of strange turquoise blue, looking up at her companion, and talking with somewhat unusual animation.  Everyone made remarks, of course—­exchanged significant glances and unlovely smiles.  It was so like the Marchioness to claim, as a matter of course, the best of everything that was going.  Lady Ruth watched them with a curious sense of irritation for which she could not altogether account.  It was impossible that she should be jealous, and yet it was equally certain that she was annoyed.  If Wingrave resisted his present fair captor, he would enjoy a notability equal to that which his wealth already conferred upon him.  No man as yet had done it.  Was it likely that Wingrave would wear two crowns?  Lady Ruth beckoned Aynesworth to her.

“Tell me,” she said, “what is Mr. Wingrave’s general attitude towards my sex?”

“Absolute indifference,” he declared promptly, “unless—­”

He stopped short.

“You must go on,” she told him.

“Unless he is possessed of the ability to make them suffer,” he answered after a moment’s hesitation.

“Then Emily will never attract him,” she declared almost triumphantly, “for she has no more heart that he has.”

“He has yet to discover it,” Aynesworth remarked.  “When he does, I think you will find that he will shrug his shoulders—­and say farewell.”

“All the same,” Lady Ruth murmured to herself, “Emily is a cat.”

Lady Ruth spoke to one more man that night of Wingrave—­and that man was her husband.  Their guests had departed, and Lady Ruth, in a marvelous white dressing gown, was lying upon the sofa in her room.

“How do you get on with Wingrave?” she asked.  “What do you think of him?”

Barrington shrugged his shoulders.

“What can one think of a man,” he answered, “who goes about like an animated mummy?  I have done my best; I talked to him for nearly half an hour at a stretch today when I took him to the club for lunch.  He is the incarnation of indifference.  He won’t listen to politics; women, or tales about them, at any rate, seem to bore him to extinction; he drinks only as a matter of form, and he won’t talk finance.  By the bye, Ruth, I wish you could get him to give you a tip.  I scarcely see how we are going to get through the season unless something turns up.”

“Is it as bad as that?” she asked.

“Worse!” her husband answered gloomily.  “We’ve been living on our capital for years.  Every acre of Queen’s Norton is mortgaged, and I’m shot if I can see how we’re going to pay the interest.”

She sighed a little wearily.

“Do you think that it would be wise?” she asked.  “Let me tell you something, Lumley.  I have only known what fear was once in my life.  I am afraid now.  I am afraid of Wingrave.  I have a fancy that he does not mean any good to us.”