She told herself that she had forgotten the two brothers, whose fate had seemed at one time so intimately bound up with her own—­the one as well as the other.  They were nothing more to her now—­they had passed away out of her life.  Henceforth she had entered upon a new course, in which her beauty and her mother wit were to exact their full value, but in which her heart was to count for nothing more.  It was to be smothered up within her.  That, together with all the best, and sweetest, and truest part of her, once awakened for a brief space by the magic touch of love, was now to be extinguished within her as though they had never been.

Meanwhile Vera enjoys herself.

She looks happy enough now as she sits by her friend’s side in the park, with a little knot of admirers about her; not taking very much trouble to talk to them, indeed, but smiling serenely from one to the other, letting herself be talked to and amused, with just a word here and there, to show them she is listening to what they say.  It is, perhaps, the secret of her success that she is so thoroughly indifferent to it all.  It matters so little to her whether they come or go; there is so little eagerness about her, so perfect an insouciance of manner.  Other women lay themselves out to attract and to be admired; Vera only sits still, and waits with a certain queenliness of manner for the worship that is laid at her feet, and which she receives as her due.

Behind her, with his hand on the back of her chair, stands a young fellow of about two or three and twenty; he does not speak to her much, nor join in the merry, empty chatter that is going on around her; but it is easy to see by the way he looks down at her, by the fashion in which he watches her slightest movement, that Vera exercises no ordinary influence over him.

He is a tall, slight-figured boy, with very fair yellow hair and delicate features; his blue eyes are frank and pleasant, but his mouth is a trifle weak and vacillating, and the lips are too sensitively cut for strength of character, whilst his chest is too narrow for strength of body.  He is carefully dressed, and wears a white, heavy-scented flower in his coat, a flower which, five minutes ago, he had ineffectually attempted to transfer to Miss Nevill’s dress; but Vera had only gently pushed back his hand.  “My dear boy, pray keep your gardenia; a flower in one’s dress is such a nuisance, it is always tumbling out.”

Denis Wilde, “the boy,” as Mrs. Hazeldine called him with a flush on his fair face, had put it back quietly in his button-hole, too well bred to show the pain he felt by flinging it, as he would have liked to do, over the railing, to be trampled under the feet of the horses.