two persons in the world.  Did they understand each other so well that they could afford to trifle?  She had an idea that their silences were eloquent, and that they might well be lavish of the crudity of speech.  Oh, they pretended very well!  The young girl found something admirable in the hard, polished surface which her aunt presented to the world:  her rouge and her diamonds, her little bird-like air of living only in the present, of being intensely interested, of having no regrets—­a manner to which Rainham responded so fluently with an assumption that she was right, that things were an excellent joke.  After all, perhaps they pretended too much; at least, she found herself often, when they were present, falling away into reveries full of conjecture, from which, as happened now, she only awoke with a slight blush to find herself directly addressed.

“Wake up, Mary! we are talking of the Sylvesters.  I was telling Philip that his little friend Eve has become entirely charming.”

“Yes,” said Mary slowly; “she is charming, certainly.  Haven’t you seen her, Philip?  You used to be constantly there.”

Rainham assumed the air of reflection.

“Really, I believe I used, when Eve was in short frocks, and Charles conspicuously absent.  Like Lady Garnett, I find the barrister exhausting.  He is very unlike his father.”

“We are going to Switzerland with them this summer, you know, Philip?  Will you join us?”

“Ah!” he put his cup down, not responding for a moment.  “It would be delightful, but I am afraid impossible.  You see, there’s the dock; I have been away from it six months, and I shall have to repeat the process when the fogs begin.  No, Lady Garnett, I won’t be tempted.”

She began to press him, and they fenced rapidly for some minutes, laughing.  Rainham had just been induced to promise that he would at least consider the proposition, when the footman announced Mr. and Miss Sylvester.  They came in a moment later; and while the barrister, a tall well-dressed man, with the shaven upper lip and neat whisker of his class, and a back which seemed to bend with difficulty, explained to Lady Garnett that his mother was suffering too much from neuralgia to come with them, Rainham resumed his acquaintance with the young girl.  He had seen little of her during the past two years, and in the last of them, in which she had changed most, he had not seen her at all.  It was with a slight shock, then, that he realized how completely she had grown up.  He remembered her in so many phases of childhood and little girlhood, ranging up from a time when her speech was incoherent, and she had sat on his knee and played with his watch, to the more recent occasions when he had met her riding in the Park with her brother; and she had waved her little whip to him, looking particularly slim and pretty in the very trying costume which fashion prescribes for little girls who ride.