“It’s full of them,” cried Mrs. Brinkley.

“I had scarcely noticed,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer; and Mrs. Brinkley knew that this was not true.  “Alice takes up all my thoughts,” she added; and this might be true enough.  She leaned a little forward and asked, in a low, entreating voice over her fan, “Mrs. Brinkley, have you seen Mr. Mavering lately?”

Mrs. Brinkley considered this a little too bold, a little too brazen.  Had they actually come South in pursuit of him?  It was shameless, and she let Mrs:  Pasmer know something of her feeling in the shortness with which she answered, “I saw him in Washington the other day—­for a moment.”  She shortened the time she had spent in Dan’s company so as to cut Mrs. Pasmer off from as much comfort as possible, and she stared at her in open astonishment.

Mrs. Pasmer dropped her eyes and fingered the edge of her fan with a submissiveness that seemed to Mrs. Brinkley the perfection of duplicity; she wanted to shake her.  “I knew,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, “that you had always been such a friend of his.”

It is the last straw which breaks the camel’s back; Mrs. Brinkley felt her moral vertebrae give way; she almost heard them crack; but if there was really a detonation, the drowned the noise with a harsh laugh.  “Oh, he had other friends in Washington.  I met him everywhere with Miss Anderson.”  This statement conflicted with the theory of her single instant with Dan, but she felt that in such a cause, in the cause of giving pain to a woman like Mrs. Pasmer, the deflection from exact truth was justifiable.  She hurried on:  “I rather expected he might run down here, but now that they’re gone, I don’t suppose he’ll come.  You remember Miss Anderson’s aunt, Miss Van Hook?”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“She was here with her.”

“Miss Van Hook was such a New York type—­of a certain kind,” said Mrs. Pasmer.  She rose, with a smile at once so conventional, so heroic, and so pitiful that Mrs. Brinkley felt the remorse of a generous victor.

She went to her room, hardening her heart, and she burst in with a flood of voluble exasperation that threatened all the neighbouring rooms with overflow.

“Well,” she cried, “they have shown their hands completely.  They have come here to hound Dan Mavering down, and get him into their toils again.  Why, the woman actually said as much!  But I fancy I have given her a fit of insomnia that will enable her to share her daughter’s vigils.  Really such impudence I never heard of!”

“Do you want everybody in the corridor to hear of it?” asked Brinkley, from behind a newspaper.

“I know one thing,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, dropping her voice a couple of octaves.  They will never get him here if I can help it.  He won’t come, anyway, now Miss Anderson is gone; but I’ll make assurance doubly sure by writing him not to come; I’ll tell him they’ve gone; and than we are going too.”