“As for that pretty girl,” continued Algernon; but Edward peremptorily stopped all speech regarding Dahlia.  His desire was, while he made holiday, to shut the past behind a brazen gate; which being communicated sympathetically to his cousin, the latter chimed to it in boisterous shouts of anticipated careless jollity at Fairly Park, crying out how they would hunt and snap fingers at Jews, and all mortal sorrows, and have a fortnight, or three weeks, perhaps a full month, of the finest life possible to man, with good horses, good dinners, good wines, good society, at command, and a queen of a woman to rule and order everything.  Edward affected a disdainful smile at the prospect; but was in reality the weaker of the two in his thirst for it.

They arrived at Fairly in time to dress for dinner, and in the drawing-room Mrs. Lovell sat to receive them.  She looked up to Edward’s face an imperceptible half-second longer than the ordinary form of welcome accords—­one of the looks which are nothing at all when there is no spiritual apprehension between young people, and are so much when there is.  To Algernon, who was gazing opals on her, she simply gave her fingers.  At her right hand, was Sir John Capes, her antique devotee; a pure milky-white old gentleman, with sparkling fingers, who played Apollo to his Daphne, and was out of breath.  Lord Suckling, a boy with a boisterous constitution, and a guardsman, had his place near her left hand, as if ready to seize it at the first whisper of encouragement or opportunity.  A very little lady of seventeen, Miss Adeline Gosling, trembling with shyness under a cover of demureness, fell to Edward’s lot to conduct down to dinner, where he neglected her disgracefully.  His father, Sir William, was present at the table, and Lord Elling, with whom he was in repute as a talker and a wit.  Quickened with his host’s renowned good wine (and the bare renown of a wine is inspiriting), Edward pressed to be brilliant.  He had an epigrammatic turn, and though his mind was prosaic when it ran alone, he could appear inventive and fanciful with the rub of other minds.  Now, at a table where good talking is cared for, the triumphs of the excelling tongue are not for a moment to be despised, even by the huge appetite of the monster Vanity.  For a year, Edward had abjured this feast.  Before the birds appeared and the champagne had ceased to make its circle, he felt that he was now at home again, and that the term of his wandering away from society was one of folly.  He felt the joy and vigour of a creature returned to his element.  Why had he ever quitted it?  Already he looked back upon Dahlia from a prodigious distance.  He knew that there was something to be smoothed over; something written in the book of facts which had to be smeared out, and he seemed to do it, while he drank the babbling wine and heard himself talk.  Not one man at that table, as he reflected, would consider the bond which held him in any serious degree binding.