Eve laughed at herself, and then sighed.  Mary looked at her curiously for a moment, finding something cold, a trace of weariness or disdain in the clear voice and the pretty, childish face.

“Philip was always like that, the kindest——­ He has always been quite a hero for me—­a kind of Colonel Newcome.”  Then she broke off rather suddenly, finding Eve in turn looking at her inquiringly.  “Isn’t it curious that we should both have known him so long without knowing each other?”

“I suppose it was because we all lived so much abroad.  And I don’t think Philip talks about his friends very much....”

Lady Garnett interrupted the tete-a-tete conversation at this point, and when her little brougham had rolled away, and a few other late guests had left Eve alone with her husband, she sat for a few minutes in the deserted drawing-room, among a wilderness of empty chairs, meditating, with her chin resting on one hand, and her eyes absently contemplating the scattered petals of a copper-coloured rose, which had fallen from some dress or bouquet upon one of the Oriental rugs which partly covered the parquet floor.

“Dick,” she said presently to her husband, who was leaning against the rails of the veranda, lazily enjoying a final cigarette, “did it ever strike you that Philip Rainham was in love with anybody?”

Lightmark turned and gazed at her through the open window wonderingly, almost suspiciously, and then broke into a laugh.

“Or that anyone was in love with him?” she pursued gravely.

“I don’t think I ever noticed it,” he answered, with another display of mirth.  “What have you discovered now, little matchmaker?”

“Not much.  I was only thinking....  What a pity Charles wasn’t here to-night!”

“Oh, you little enigma!  Is it that dear Charles who is to be pitied, or who?  We, for instance?”

But Eve assumed a superior air, and Lightmark, who hated riddles, dismissed the subject and the end of his cigarette simultaneously.

CHAPTER XXII

One afternoon, three months later, Rainham, finding himself in the neighbourhood of Parton Street, took the occasion of knocking at Lady Garnett’s door, and found, somewhat to his surprise, that the two ladies were returned.  Introduced into their presence—­they were sitting in the library, in close proximity to a considerable fire—­he learnt that their summer wanderings that year had been of no extensive nature, and that they had come into residence a week ago.

They had spent a month in a country house in Berkshire, the old lady told him presently, adding, with an explanatory grimace, that it was a house which belonged to a relation—­the sort of place where one had to visit now and again; where a month went a very long way; where one had to draw largely on one’s courtesy—­on one’s hypocrisy (if he preferred the word), not to throw up the cards at once, and retire after the first week.