“Do you mean to say——?” he queried.

“It is very obvious,” she answered quickly; “I saw it long ago.  But don’t imagine that he got much out of me.  I was as deep as a well.  But what do you think of it?”

“I hope they will be happy,” he answered absently.  She arched her expressive brows, and he coloured, recollected himself.  “I beg your pardon,” he said hastily; “I confess I was thinking of something else.  You were talking of Mary; why should it not do?  Does she care about him?”

His companion laughed, and her laugh had more than its wonted suggestion of irony.

“My dear Philip, for a clever man you can be singularly dense!  Care for him! of course she does not.”

“She might do worse,” he said; “Sylvester is not very bright, but he works hard, and will succeed after a fashion.  His limitations dovetail conveniently with his capacities.  What do you intend to do?”

“Do I ever interfere in these things?  My dear, you are remarkably dull to-night.  I never make marriages, nor prevent them.  With all my faults, match-making is not one of them.  I think too ill of life to try and arrange it.  You must admit,” she added, “that, long as I have known you, I have never tried to marry you?”

“Ah, that would have been too fatuous!” he remarked lightly.

They were both silent for a while, regarding each other disinterestedly; they appeared to be following a train of thought which led no whither; presently Lady Garnett asked: 

“Are you going abroad this year?”

“Yes,” he said, “as soon as I can—­about the middle of October; to Mentone or Bordighera, I suppose.”

“Do you find them interesting?  Do they do you much good?”

He smiled rather listlessly, ignoring her second question.

“I confess,” he said, “it becomes rather a bore.  But, I suppose, at my time of life one finds nothing very interesting.  The mere act of living becomes rather a bore after a time.”

“I wonder what you are thinking about, Philip?” she asked meditatively; “something has annoyed you to-night; I wonder if you are going to tell me.”

He laughed.

“Do we ever tell each other our annoyances?  I think we sit and look at each other, and discover them.  That is much more appropriate.”

“You take things too seriously,” she went on; “my dear, they are really not worth it.  That is my settled conviction.”

She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration.  Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age.  And he could not conceive her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure “in the high places of laughter”—­a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic—­in the decent drapery of her fictitious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her expressive eyebrows.