‘I have had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Mutimer before,’ Hubert said as soon as he saw that Adela in voice and look recognised their acquaintance.

Mrs. Boscobel was evidently surprised.  She herself had met Hubert at the house of an artist in Rome more than a year ago, but the details of his life were unknown to her.  Subsequently, in London, she happened once to get on the subject of Socialism with him, and told him, as an interesting story, what she heard from the Westlakes about Richard Mutimer.  Hubert admitted knowledge of the facts, and made the remark about the valley of Wanley which Mrs. Boscobel repeated at Exmouth, but he revealed nothing more.  Having no marriageable daughter, Mrs. Boscobel was under no necessity of searching into his antecedents.  He was one of ten or a dozen young men of possible future whom she liked to have about her.

Hubert seated himself by Adela, and there was a moment of inevitable silence.

‘I saw you as soon as I got into the room,’ he said, in the desperate necessity for speech of some kind.  ’I thought I must have been mistaken; I was so unprepared to meet you here.’

Adela replied that she was staying with Mrs. Westlake.

‘I don’t know her,’ said Hubert, ’and am very anxious to Boscobel’s portrait of her—­I saw it in the studio just before it went away—­was a wonderful thing.’

This was necessarily said in a low tone; it seemed to establish confidence between them.

Adela experienced a sudden and strange calm; in a world so entirely new to her, was it not to be expected that things would happen of which she had never dreamt?  The tremor with which she had faced this her first evening in general society had allayed itself almost as soon as she entered the room, giving place to a kind of pleasure for which she was not at all prepared, a pleasure inconsistent with the mood which governed her life.  Perhaps, had she been brought into this world in those sunny days before her marriage, just such pleasure as this, only in a more pronounced degree, would have awoke in her and have been fearlessly indulged.  The first shock of the meeting with Hubert having passed, she was surprised at her self-control, at the ease with which she found she could converse.  Hubert took her down to dinner; on the stairs he twice turned to look at her face, yet she felt sure that her hand had betrayed no agitation as it lay on his arm.  At table he talked freely; did he know—­she asked herself—­that this would relieve her?  And his conversation was altogether unlike what it had been two years and a half ago—­so long it was since she had talked with him under ordinary conditions.  There was still animation, and the note of intellectual impatience was touched occasionally, but the world had ripened him, his judgments were based on sounder knowledge, he was more polished, more considerate—­’gentler,’ Adela afterwards said to herself.  And decidedly he had gained in personal appearance; a good deal of the bright, eager boy had remained with him in his days of storm and stress, but now his features had the repose of maturity and their refinement had fixed itself in lines of strength.