‘I beg your pardon.’  The voice was addressing her in a respectful undertone.  ’I had no choice.  I did not feel justified in saying I knew you.’

‘You were quite right,’ she replied coldly, her fingers now relaxed upon the fan.  ’Mrs. Strangeways is a little impulsive; she gave me no opportunity of preventing the introduction.’

’Will you let me say, Mrs. Rolfe, that I am glad to have been presented to you as a stranger?  I should be happy indeed if our acquaintance might begin anew.’

It was polite in terms, but sounded to Alma very like the coolest impertinence.  She bent her head, ever so little.  The second seat of the causeuse being unoccupied, Redgrave hereupon took possession of it.  No sooner had he done so than Alma rose, let a smile of indifference just fall upon him, and lost herself amid the buzzing assembly.

Ten minutes later, Redgrave and Mrs. Carnaby were lounging in these same seats, conversing with perfect mutual intelligence.  They had not met for three years, but the interval signified very little in their lives, and they resumed conversation practically at the point where it had broken off in Mrs. Frothingham’s drawing-room.  A tactful question assured the man of the world that Mrs. Carnaby knew nothing of certain passages at Munich and Bregenz.

‘I’m afraid,’ he added, ’Mrs. Rolfe has become a little reserved.  Natural, no doubt.’

‘She lives in a wild part of Wales,’ Sibyl answered, smiling tolerantly.  ‘And her husband detests society.’

’Indeed?  Odd choice for her to have made, don’t you think? —­ And so your Odyssey is over?  We shall have some chance of seeing you again.’

’But your own Odyssey is perpetually going on.  Are you ever in town except for a few weeks of the season?’

’Oh, I go about very little now; I’m settling down. —­ You never met my sister, I think?  She has a house at Wimbledon with a good-sized garden —­ sort of little park, in fact, —­ and I have persuaded her to let me build myself a bungalow among the trees.’

‘Splendid idea!’

’Not bad, I think.  One is free there; a member of the family whenever one likes; domesticated; all that’s respectable; and only a few steps away, the bachelor snuggery, with all that’s ——.  No, no!  I was not going to complete the antithesis, though by your smiling you seem to say so.’

‘The suggestion was irresistible,’ said Sibyl, with the composure, the air of security, which always covered her excursions on to slippery ground.

’When the weather is good, I ask a few of my friends to come and sit there in the shade.  They may or may not be my sister’s friends also; that doesn’t matter.  I have a separate entrance from the road. —­ But I wish you knew Mrs. Fenimore.  She lived a year or two at Stuttgart, for her children to learn German.  Her husband’s in India.  She tried it, but couldn’t stand the climate.’