* * * * *

The evening went no better.  Lord Parham was set down to cards with Kitty, Eddie Helston, and Lord Grosville.  Lord Grosville, his partner, played, to the Premier’s thinking, like an idiot, and Lady Kitty and the young man chattered and sparred, so that all reasonable play became impossible.  Lord Parham lost more than he at all liked to lose, and at half-past ten he pleaded fatigue, refused to smoke, and went to his room.

Ashe was perfectly aware of the failure of the evening, and the discomfort of his guest.  But he said nothing, and Kitty avoided his neighborhood.  Meanwhile, between him and his mother a certain tacit understanding began to make itself felt.  They talked quietly, in corners, of the arrangements for the speech and fete of the morrow.  So far, they had been too much left to Kitty.  Ashe promised his mother to look into them.  He and she combined for the protection of Lord Parham.

When about one o’clock Ashe went to bed, Kitty either was or pretended to be fast asleep.  The room was in darkness save for the faint illumination of a night-light, which just revealed to Ashe the delicate figure of his wife, lying high on her pillows, her cheek and brow hidden in the confusion of her hair.

One window was wide open to the night, and once more Ashe stood lost in “recollection” beside it, as on that night in Hill Street, more than a year before.  But the thoughts which on that former occasion had been still as tragic and unfamiliar guests in a mind that repelled them had now, alack, lost their strangeness; they entered habitually, unannounced—­frequent, irritating, deplorable.

Had the relation between himself and Kitty ever, in truth, recovered the shock of that incident on the river—­of his night of restlessness, his morning of agonized alarm, and the story to which he listened on her return?  It had been like some physical blow or wound, easily healed or conquered for the moment, which then, as time goes on, reveals a hidden series of consequences.

Consequences, in this case, connected above all with Kitty’s own nature and temperament.  The excitement of Cliffe’s declaration, of her own resistance and dramatic position, as between her husband and her lover, had worked ever since, as a poison in Kitty’s mind—­Ashe was becoming dismally certain of it.  The absurd incident of the night before with the photograph had been enough to prove it.

Well, the thing, he supposed, would right itself in time.  Meanwhile, Cliffe had been dismissed, and this foolish young fellow Eddie Helston must soon follow him.  Ashe had viewed the affair so far with an amused tolerance; if Kitty liked to flirt with babes it was her affair, not his.  But he perceived that his mother was once more becoming restless, under the general inconvenance of it; and he had noticed distress and disapproval in the little Dean, Kitty’s stanchest friend.