“Frivolity!” echoed Miss Masters.  “I have been dancing, this last waltz, with Lord Overstock.  I have sent him to find my fan.  I told him exactly where to look, but I suppose he can’t discover it.  He’s not very clever, you know!”

“Poor Lord Overstock!  I hope he won’t find it just yet and come to turn me out of his seat.  I’m so tired of standing, of introducing men whose names I never knew to girls whose names I have forgotten, and of trying to avoid introducing the same people twice over.  It’s so difficult to recognize people in their powder and patches!”

“Yes,” said Mary slowly, with a kind of inward resentment which she could not subdue, although she felt that it was unreasonable, “I almost wonder that you recognised me.”

Eve glanced at her, struck by her tone, trying to read her expression in the dim light, a shadow of bewilderment passing over her own face and for a moment lowering the brilliancy of her eyes.  Then she smiled again, dismissing her thought with a little laugh which broke off abruptly.

“One so soon forgets!” the other added, with an intention in her voice, an involuntary betrayal which she almost immediately regretted.

“Forgets!”

Eve caught up the word eagerly, almost passionately, her voice falling into a lower key.

“Forget!  Forgive and forget!” repeated Mary quickly and recklessly, letting her eyes wander from her own clasped hands to Eve’s bouquet of delicate, scentless fritillaries, which lay neglected where it had fallen on the floor between their feet.  “How easy it sounds!—­is perhaps—­and yet—­I have not so much to forget—­or to be forgiven!”

The last words were almost whispered, but for Eve’s imagination, poised on tiptoe like a hunted creature blindly listening for the approach of the Pursuer, they were full of suggestion, of denunciation.

She remembered now, with a swiftly banished pang of jealousy, that this girl had loved him.

Her thought sped back to a summer evening nearly a year ago, when it had seemed to her that she had surprised her friend’s secret.

“What do you mean, Mary?” she demanded courageously.  “What have I to be forgiven?  Don’t despise me; don’t, for Heaven’s sake, don’t play with me!  I am all in the dark!  Are you accusing me?  Do you think because I say nothing that I have forgotten—­that I can forget?  Is it something about—­him?”

Mary cast a rapid glance at her.

“Are you afraid of his name, then?”

Eve dropped her hands despairingly.

“Ah, you do!  You are playing with me!  About Philip Rainham, then!  For Heaven’s sake speak!  Do you know what I only guess—­that he was innocent?  For God’s sake say it!”

It was Mary’s turn to look bewildered, to feel penitent.  She began to recognise that there were greater depths in Eve’s nature than she had suspected, that her indifference might, after all, prove to have been merely a mask.