“You are wonderful,” he exclaimed, after an interval, “wonderful; that was what I was thinking.”

She smiled disinterestedly.

“Because you don’t understand me?  My dear, nothing is so easy as mystification; that is why I don’t return the compliment.  Yourself, you know, are not very intelligible to-night.”

He looked away frowning, but without embarrassment; presently throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he remarked: 

“I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can’t.  I am unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find Mary.”

“Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary yet; smoke another cigarette.”

He took one and lit it, absently, in the blue flame of the spirit-lamp, and she watched him closely with her bright, curious eyes.

“You know this Mr. Lightmark very well, don’t you, Philip?”

“Intimately,” he answered, nodding.

“You must be pleased,” she said.  “It is a great match for him, a struggling artist.  Can he paint, by the way?”

“He has great talent.”  He held his cigarette away from him, considered the ash critically.  “Yes, he can certainly paint.  I suppose it is a good thing—­and for Eve, too.  Why should it not be?”

“He is a charming young man”—­she spoke judicially—­“charming!  But in effect Mary was quite right; she generally is—­he is not sincere.”

“I think you are wrong,” said Rainham after a moment.  “I should be sorry to believe you were not, for the little girl’s sake.  And I have known him a long time; he is a good fellow at bottom.”

“Ah!” cried Lady Garnett with a little, quick gesture of her right hand, “that is precisely what he is not.  He exaggerates; he must be very secret; no one ever was so frank as he seems to be.”

“Why are you saying all this to me?” the other asked after a moment.  “You know I should be very sorry; but what can I do? it’s arranged.”

“I think you might have prevented it, if you had cared; but, as you say, it is too late now.”

“There was no way possible in which I could have prevented it,” he said slowly, after an interval which seemed to strike them both as ponderous.

“That was an admission I wanted,” she flashed back.  “You would have prevented it—­you would have given worlds to have prevented it.”

His retort came as quickly, accented by a smile: 

“Not a halfpenny.  I make no admissions; and I have not the faintest idea of what you are driving at.  I am a pure spectator.  To quote yourself, I don’t make marriages, nor mar them; I think too ill of life.”

“Ah no!” she said; “it is that you are too indolent; you disappoint me.”

“It is you, dear lady, who are inconsistent,” he cried, laughing.

“No, you disappoint me,” she resumed; “seriously, my dear, I am dissatisfied with you.  You will not assert yourself; you do nothing; you have done nothing.  There never was a man who made less of his life.”