her name.

"I will not talk about myself," she said, in a cold, hard tone. "That's
a man's prerogative. But I wish you, when we are alone, to tell me all
about your life. The lines of our lives, which once bade fair to run
along together, have diverged; but fate is strong. We are thrown
together again. I know not whether it matters to you that we have met
again, but it does very much to me. I wish to know what you have been
doing all these years. To-morrow, surely, we shall have a chance to see
each other, and till then let us change the subject, for if the walls
have not ears, Mr. Sydney certainly has, and very large and ugly ones,
too, like a lop-eared rabbit's."

Geoffrey looked with a smile at poor Mr. Sydney's villified ears, and
said to himself that the unfortunate wit never could live in much
comfort upon the royalties from the sale of his picture. Mrs. Carey
looked around the table searchingly. Her quick wit was tickled by the
curious incongruities of the scene; by Richard Lincoln talking small
nothings to the Duchess of Bayswater across the rich American; by the
genial and smirking Jawkins, seated between Sir John Dacre and that
pink of fashion, Colonel Featherstone; by Lady Carringford, who was
between the indifferent Colonel and the Duke; by the three members of
the artiste class, Prouty, Diddlej and Sydney, whom Mr. Jawkins had
placed together with delicate discrimination. Mrs. Carey gave a little
shrug at perceiving that she, too, was put in the same neighborhood.
Lord Carringford and the Duchess seemed to be getting along uncommonly
well together. Sir John Dacre ignored his dapper neighbor, Jawkins, and
was absorbed in conversation with beautiful Mary Lincoln, who blushed
whenever she caught her father's eye looking questioningly at her. Mrs.
Carey's glance over the table was at first cursory; she had been so much
interested in meeting Geoffrey that the tide of old feelings, surging
back through her brain, had driven out all thought of the other people,
for in the heart of this woman of the world, who had lived in ball-rooms
and in the maddest whirl of that most mad and material of all things,
modern society, where love is a plaything and an excitement only, there
had lingered a fond remembrance of the ardent young lover, whose boyish
affection for her, absence had so quickly cooled. Through all his
wanderings she had managed to trace him. The world of society is small.
She had heard of his affair with Mi