Here she stopped suddenly, with the least show of embarrassment.  Then she said frankly, “You are an old friend of hers.  It is very good of you to have risked so much for the sake of that girl.  There are very few gentlemen whom one meets who would do as much.”

Ingram could say nothing, and was a little impatient with himself.  Was he to be first reproved, and then treated with an indulgent kindness, by a mere girl?

“Mamma,” said Mrs. Lorraine, as an elderly lady entered the room, “let me introduce to you Mr. Ingram, whom you must already know.  He proposes we should join in some conspiracy to inveigle Mrs. Lavender into society, and make the poor little thing amuse herself.”

“Little!” said Mrs. Kavanagh with a smile:  “she is a good deal taller than you are, my dear.  But I am afraid, Mr. Ingram, you have undertaken a hopeless task.  Will you stay to luncheon and talk it over with us?”

“I hope you will,” said Mrs. Lorraine; and naturally enough he consented.

Luncheon was just ready.  As they were going into the room on the opposite side of the hall, the younger lady said to Ingram in a quiet undertone, but with much indifference of manner, “You know, if you think I ought to give up Mr. Lavender’s acquaintance altogether, I will do so at once.  But perhaps that will not be necessary.”

So this was the house in which Sheila’s husband spent so much of his time, and these were the two ladies of whom so much had been said and surmised?  There were three of Lavender’s pictures on the walls of the dining-room, and as Ingram inadvertently glanced at them, Mrs. Lorraine said to him, “Don’t you think it is a pity Mr. Lavender should continue drawing those imaginative sketches of heads?  I do not think, myself, that he does himself justice in that way.  Some bits of landscape, now, that I have seen seemed to me to have quite a definite character about them, and promised far more than anything else of his I have seen.”

“That is precisely what I think,” said Ingram, partly amused and partly annoyed to find that this girl, with her clear gray eyes, her soft and musical voice and her singular delicacy of manner, had an evil trick of saying the very things he would himself have said, and leaving him with nothing but a helpless “Yes.”

“I think he ought to have given up his club when he married.  Most English gentlemen do that when they marry, do they not?” said Mrs. Kavanagh.

“Some,” said Ingram.  “But a good deal of nonsense is talked about the influence of clubs in that way.  It is really absurd to suppose that the size or the shape of a building can alter a man’s moral character.”