“Let me see, who was I with in the Park this morning?  A very good-looking dark boy?  Oh no, not Comus Bassington.  Someone you know by name, anyway, and I expect you’ve seen his portrait in the papers.”

“A flying-man?” asked Mrs. Brankley.

“Courtenay Youghal,” said Elaine.

Mrs. Brankley and Suzette had often rehearsed in the privacy of their minds the occasion when Elaine should come to pay her personal congratulations to her engaged cousin.  It had never been in the least like this.

On her return from her enjoyable afternoon visit Elaine found an express messenger letter waiting for her.  It was from Comus, thanking her for her loan—­and returning it.

“I suppose I ought never to have asked you for it,” he wrote, “but you are always so deliciously solemn about money matters that I couldn’t resist.  Just heard the news of your engagement to Courtenay.  Congrats. to you both.  I’m far too stoney broke to buy you a wedding present so I’m going to give you back the bread-and-butter dish.  Luckily it still has your crest on it.  I shall love to think of you and Courtenay eating bread-and-butter out of it for the rest of your lives.”

That was all he had to say on the matter about which Elaine had been preparing to write a long and kindly-expressed letter, closing a rather momentous chapter in her life and his.  There was not a trace of regret or upbraiding in his note; he had walked out of their mutual fairyland as abruptly as she had, and to all appearances far more unconcernedly.  Reading the letter again and again Elaine could come to no decision as to whether this was merely a courageous gibe at defeat, or whether it represented the real value that Comus set on the thing that he had lost.

And she would never know.  If Comus possessed one useless gift to perfection it was the gift of laughing at Fate even when it had struck him hardest.  One day, perhaps, the laughter and mockery would be silent on his lips, and Fate would have the advantage of laughing last.

CHAPTER XII

A door closed and Francesca Bassington sat alone in her well-beloved drawing-room.  The visitor who had been enjoying the hospitality of her afternoon-tea table had just taken his departure.  The tete-a-tete had not been a pleasant one, at any rate as far as Francesca was concerned, but at least it had brought her the information for which she had been seeking.  Her role of looker-on from a tactful distance had necessarily left her much in the dark concerning the progress of the all-important wooing, but during the last few hours she had, on slender though significant evidence, exchanged her complacent expectancy for a conviction that something had gone wrong.  She had spent the previous evening at her brother’s house, and had naturally seen nothing of Comus in that uncongenial quarter; neither had he put in an appearance at the breakfast table the following morning.  She had met him in the hall at eleven o’clock, and he had hurried past her, merely imparting the information that he would not be in till dinner that evening.  He spoke in his sulkiest tone, and his face wore a look of defeat, thinly masked by an air of defiance; it was not the defiance of a man who is losing, but of one who has already lost.