“I shall send you a little note; I won’t let you forget,” she said.  Then she suddenly shook hands with the ladies of the house and was flashingly gone.

Verrian thought he might ask the daughter of the house, “And if I don’t forget, am I engaged to spend Christmas week with her?”

The girl laughed.  “If she doesn’t forget, you are.  But you’ll have a good time.  She’ll know how to manage that.”  Other guests kept coming up to take leave, and Verrian, who did not want to go just yet, was retired to the background, where the girl’s voice, thrown over her shoulder at him, reached him in the words, as gay as if they were the best of the joke, “It’s on the Sound.”

The inference was that Mrs. Westangle’s place was on the Sound; and that was all Verrian knew about it till he got her little note.  Mrs. Westangle knew how to write in a formless hand, but she did not know how to spell, and she had thought it best to have a secretary who could write well and spell correctly.  Though, as far as literacy was concerned, she was such an almost incomparably ignorant woman, she had all the knowledge the best society wants, or, if she found herself out of any, she went and bought some; she was able to buy almost anything.

Verrian thanked the secretary for remembering him, in the belief that he was directly thanking Mrs. Westangle, whose widespread consciousness his happiness in accepting did not immediately reach; and in the very large house party, which he duly joined under her roof, he was aware of losing distinctiveness almost to the point of losing identity.  This did not quite happen on the way to Belford, for, when he went to take his seat in the drawing-room car, a girl in the chair fronting him put out her hand with the laugh of Miss Macroyd.

“She did remember you!” she cried out.  “How delightful!  I don’t see how she ever got onto you”—­she made the slang her own—­“in the first place, and she must have worked hard to be sure of you since.”

Verrian hung up his coat and put his suit-case behind his chair, the porter having put it where he could not wheel himself vis-a-vis with the girl.  “She took all the time there was,” he answered.  “I got my invitation only the day before yesterday, and if I had been in more demand, or had a worse conscience—­”

“Oh, do say worse conscience!  It’s so much more interesting,” the girl broke in.

“—­I shouldn’t have the pleasure of going to Seasands with you now,” he concluded, and she gave her laugh.  “Do I understand that simply my growing fame wouldn’t have prevailed with her?”

Anything seemed to make Miss Macroyd laugh.  “She couldn’t have cared about that, and she wouldn’t have known.  You may be sure that it was a social question with her after the personal question was settled.  She must have liked your looks!” Again Miss Macroyd laughed.

“On that side I’m invulnerable.  It’s only a literary vanity to be soothed or to be wounded that I have,” Verrian said.