She was giving now as she sang, “Caro mio ben.”

Towards the end of the song, when Dion was deeply in it and in her who sang it, he was disturbed by a woman’s whisper coming from close behind him.  He did not catch the beginning of what was communicated, but he did catch the end.  It was this:  “Over there, the famous Mrs. Clarke.”

But Mrs. Clarke was in Paris.  Daventry had told him so.  Dion looked quickly about the large and crowded room, but could not see Mrs. Clarke.  Then he glanced behind him to see the whisperer, and beheld a hard-faced, middle-aged and very well-known woman—­one of those women who, by dint of perpetually “going about,” become at length something less than human.  He was quite sure Mrs. Brackenhurst would not make a mistake about anything which happened at a party.  She might fail to recognize her husband, if she met him about her house, because he was so seldom there; she would not fail to recognize the heroine of a resounding divorce case.  Mrs. Clarke must certainly have returned from Paris and be somewhere in that room, listening to Rosamund and probably watching her.  Dion scarcely knew whether this fact made him sorry or glad.  He did know, however, that it oddly excited him.

When “Caro mio ben” was ended people began to move.  Rosamund was surrounded and congratulated, and Dion saw Esme Darlington bending to her, half paternally, half gallantly, and speaking to her emphatically.  Mrs. Chetwinde drifted up to her; and three or four young men hovered near to her, evidently desirous of putting in a word.  The success of her leaped to the eye.  Dion saw it and glowed.  But the excitement in him persisted, and he began to move towards the far side of the great room in search of Mrs. Clarke.  If she had just come in she would probably be near the door by which the pathetic Echo stood on her pedestal of marble, withdrawn in her punishment, in her abasement beautiful and wistful.  How different was Rosamund from Echo!  Dion looked across at her joyous and radiant animation, as she smiled and talked almost with the eagerness and vitality of a child; and he had the thought, “How goodness preserves!” Women throng the secret rooms of the vanity specialists, put their trust in pomades, in pigments, in tinctures, in dyes; and the weariness and the sin become lustrous, perhaps, but never are hidden or even obscured.  His Rosamund trusted in a wholesome life, with air blowing through it, with sound sleep as its anodyne, with purity on guard at its door; and radiance and youth sparkled up in her like fountain spray in the sunshine.  And the wholesomeness of her was a lure to the many even in a drawing-room of London.  He saw powdered women, women with darkened eyebrows, and touched-up lips, and hair that had forgotten long ago what was its natural color, looking at her, and he fancied there was a dull wonder in their eyes.  Perhaps they were thinking:  “Yes, that’s the recipe—­being gay in goodness!” And perhaps some of them were