“Do you know most of the people dining?” she enquired in her blandest voice.  “But no doubt you do.  You are a great friend of Mr. Wharton’s, I think?”

“He stayed at our house last year,” said Marcella, abruptly.  “No, I don’t know anybody.”

“Then shall I tell you?  It makes it more interesting, doesn’t it?  It ought to be a pleasant little party.”

And the great lady lightly ran over the names.  It seemed to Marcella that most of them were very “smart” or very important.  Some of the smart names were vaguely known to her from Miss Raeburn’s talk of last year; and, besides, there were a couple of Tory Cabinet ministers and two or three prominent members.  It was all rather surprising.

At dinner she found herself between one of the Cabinet ministers and the young and good-looking private secretary of the other.  Both men were agreeable, and very willing, besides, to take trouble with this unknown beauty.  The minister, who knew the Raeburns very well, was discussing with himself all the time whether this was indeed the Miss Boyce of that story.  His suspicion and curiosity were at any rate sufficiently strong to make him give himself much pains to draw her out.

Her own conversation, however, was much distracted by the attention she could not help giving to her host and his surroundings.  Wharton had Lady Selina on his right, and the young and distinguished wife of Marcella’s minister on his left.  At the other end of the table sat Mrs. Lane, doing her duty spasmodically to Lord Alresford, who still, in a blind old age, gave himself all the airs of the current statesman and possible premier.  But the talk, on the whole, was general—­a gay and careless give-and-take of parliamentary, social, and racing gossip, the ball flying from one accustomed hand to another.

And Marcella could not get over the astonishment of Wharton’s part in it.  She shut her eyes sometimes for an instant and tried to see him as her girl’s fancy had seen him at Mellor—­the solitary, eccentric figure pursued by the hatreds of a renounced Patricianate—­bringing the enmity of his own order as a pledge and offering to the Plebs he asked to lead.  Where even was the speaker of an hour ago?  Chat of Ascot and of Newmarket; discussion with Lady Selina or with his left-hand neighbour of country-house “sets,” with a patter of names which sounded in her scornful ear like a paragraph from the World; above all, a general air of easy comradeship, which no one at this table, at any rate, seemed inclined to dispute, with every exclusiveness and every amusement of the “idle rich,” whereof—­in the popular idea—­he was held to be one of the very particular foes!—­