Lady Tranmore made no answer.  She gazed into the fire, and Miss Lyster thought her depressed.

“Has William ever interfered?” she asked, cautiously.

Lady Tranmore hesitated.

“Not that I know of,” she said, at last.  “Nor will he ever—­in the sense in which any ordinary husband would interfere.”

“I know!  It is as though he had a kind of superstition about it.  Isn’t there a fairy story, in which an elf marries a mortal on condition that if he ever ill-treats her, her people will fetch her back to fairyland?  One day the husband lost his temper and spoke crossly; instantly there was a crash of thunder and the elf-wife vanished.”

“I don’t remember the story.  But it’s like that—­exactly.  He said to me once that he would never have asked her to marry him if he had not been able to make up his mind to let her have her own way—­never to coerce her.”

But having said this, Lady Tranmore repented.  It seemed to her she had been betraying William’s affairs.  She drew her chair back from the fire, and rang to ask if the carriage had arrived.  Mary took the hint.  She arrayed herself in her cloak, and chatted agreeably about other things till the moment for their departure came.

As they drove through the streets, Lady Tranmore stole a glance at her companion.

“She is really very handsome,” she thought—­“much better-looking than she was at twenty.  What are the men about, not to marry her?”

It was indeed a puzzle.  For Mary was increasingly agreeable as the years went on, and had now quite a position of her own in London, as a charming woman without angles or apparent egotisms; one of the initiated besides, whom any dinner-party might be glad to capture.  Her relations, near and distant, held so many of the points of vantage in English public life that her word inevitably carried weight.  She talked politics, as women of her class must talk them to hold their own; she supported the Church; and she was elegantly charitable, in that popular sense which means that you subscribe to your friends’ charities without setting up any of your own.  She was rich also—­already in possession of a considerable fortune, inherited from her mother, and prospective heiress of at least as much again from her father, old Sir Richard Lyster, whose house in Somersetshire she managed to perfection.  In the season she stayed with various friends, or with Lady Tranmore, Sir Richard being now infirm, and preferring the country.  There was a younger sister, who was known to have married imprudently, and against her father’s wishes, some five or six years before this.  Catharine was poor, the wife of a clergyman with young children.  Lady Tranmore sometimes wondered whether Mary was quite as good to her as she might be.  She herself sent Catharine various presents in the course of the year for the children.

—­Yes, it was certainly surprising that Mary had not married.  Lady Tranmore’s thoughts were running on this tack when of a sudden her eyes were caught by the placard of one of the evening papers.