Not that her anxiety centred on material things; they were too remote from the general activities of her thought for that.  She distilled her fear out of the living atmosphere around her.  She was no novice in this brilliant, dissolute society, or in the meanings hidden behind its apparently trivial concerns.  Hints that would have had slight significance for one less expert she found luminous with suggestion; and she read by signs as faint as those in which the redskin detects the passage of his foe across the grass.  The odd smile with which Diane went out!  The dull silence in which George came home!  The manufactured conversation!  The forced gayety!  The startling pause!  The effort to begin again, and keep the tone to one of common intercourse!  The long defile of guests!  The strangers who came, grew intimate, and disappeared!  The glances that followed Diane when she crossed a room!  The shrug, the whisper, the suggestive grimace, at the mention of her name!  All these were as an alphabet in which Mrs. Eveleth, grown skilful by long years of observation, read what had become not less familiar than her mother-tongue.

The fact that her misgivings were not new made it the more difficult to understand why they had focussed themselves to-night into this great fear.  There had been nothing unusual about the day, except that she had seen little of Diane, while George had remained shut up in his room, writing letters and arranging or destroying papers.  There had been nothing out of the common in either of them—­not even the frown of care on George’s forehead, or the excited light in Diane’s eyes—­as they drove away in the evening, to dine at the Spanish Embassy.  They had kissed her tenderly, but it was not till after they had gone that it seemed to her as if they had been taking a farewell.  Then, too, other little tokens suddenly became ominous; while something within herself seemed to say, “The hour is at hand!”

The hour is at hand!  Standing in the middle of one of the gorgeous rooms, she repeated the words softly, marking as she did so their incongruity to herself and her surroundings.  The note of fatality jarred on the harmony of this well-ordered life.  It was preposterous, that she, who had always been hedged round and sheltered by pomp and circumstance, should now in her middle age be menaced with calamity.  She dragged herself over to one of the long mirrors and gazed at her reflection pityingly.

The twitter of birds startled her with the knowledge that it was dawn.  From the Embassy George and Diane were to go on to two or three great houses, but surely they should be home by this time!  The reflection meant the renewal of her fear.  Where was her son?  Was he really with his wife, or had the moment come when he must take the law into his own hands, after their French manner, to avenge himself or her?  She knew nothing about duelling, but she had the Anglo-Saxon mother’s dread of it.  She had always hoped that, notwithstanding the social code under which he lived, George would keep clear of any such brutal senselessness; but lately she had begun to fear that the conventions of the world would prove the stronger, and that the time when they would do so was not far away.