“About America?  Oh, they have been blown up so often!  You, for instance, have been doing your best—­for months.”

His perfunctory laugh answered the mockery of her charming eyes.

“Well—­I wish I could make William hear reason.”

Lady Tranmore held herself stiffly.  The Christian name seemed to her an offence.  It was true that in old days he and Cliffe had been on those terms.  Now—­it was a piece of bad taste.

“Probably what is reason to you is folly to him,” she said, dryly.

“No, no!—­he knows,” said Cliffe, with impatience.  “The others don’t.  Parham is more impossible—­more crassly, grossly ignorant!” He lifted hands and eyes in protest.  “But Ashe, of course, is another matter altogether.”

“Well, go and see him—­go and talk to him!” said Lady Tranmore, still mocking.  “There are no lions in the way.”

“None,” said Cliffe.  “As a matter of fact, Lady Kitty has asked me to luncheon.  But does one find Ashe himself in the middle of the day?”

At the mention of her daughter-in-law Elizabeth made an involuntary movement.  Mary, standing beside her, turned towards her and smiled.

“Not often.”  The tone was cold.  “But you could always find him at the House.”  And Lady Tranmore moved away.

“Is there a quiet corner anywhere?” said Cliffe to Mary.  “I have such heaps to tell you.”

So while some Polish gentleman in the main drawing-room, whose name ended in ski, challenged his violin to the impossible, Cliffe and Mary retired from observation into a small room thrown open with the rest of the suite, which was in truth the morning-room of the ambassadress.

As soon as they found themselves alone, there was a pause in their conversation; each involuntarily looked at the other.  Mary certainly recognized that these years of absence had wrought a noticeable change in the man before her.  He had aged.  Hard living and hard travelling had left their marks.  But, like Lady Tranmore, she also perceived another difference.  The eyes bent upon her were indeed, as before, the eyes of a man self-centred, self-absorbed.  There was no chivalrous softness in them, no consideration.  The man who owned them used them entirely for his own purposes; they betrayed none of that changing instinctive relation towards the human being—­any human being—­within their range, which makes the charm of so many faces.  But they were sadder, more sombre, more restless; they thrilled her more than they had already thrilled her once, in the first moment of her youth.