eel that something
was a little wrong. Then she had made him and Daisy play billiards
together, while she marked for them. She marked with weary accuracy,
and said, "Oh, what a beautiful stroke" rather too often to make it
credible that she always meant it. And with the rest of the women she
had gone up to bed rather early.

Tom Lindfield, on the other hand, though he did not feel at all inclined
to go to bed early, felt that there was trouble somewhere. He could not
date it in the least, nor could he put his finger on the moment when
trouble began. Or could he? He asked himself that question several
times. Jeannie had been so pleasant and so good a comrade till they had
gone out in the punt. Then came the compact of friendship, and somehow
at once almost she seemed to slip away from him. He had wanted to tell
her much more, to tell her even how in Paris he had been desperately in
love, and that what he felt now for Daisy was not that. Somehow that
woman in Paris reminded him of Daisy, and yet what two women could be
more different than these! She had an apartment in the Rue Chalgrin. It
was very much gilded, and yet very simple.

That did not occupy him much. What occupied him so much more was that
till the storm had begun, till he and Jeannie had run hurriedly to the
house, he had found such an extreme content in her society. She had
been--for these last thirty hours or so--such an admirable comrade.
There was the Brahms concert, the ridiculous motor-drive, the evening
at billiards, the morning in the motor, the afternoon in the punt. Then
quite suddenly she had seemed to shut up, to enclose herself from him.
Yet some little spirit of companionship had escaped her again, when she
quoted the line, "In the darkness thick and hot." And then, after that,
she had walked back to the house, made him play billiards with Daisy,
and had gone upstairs at the earliest possible opportunity.

Nobody with the slightest prospect of winning his case could have
accused Tom Lindfield of being sensitive in his perceptions, but nobody
without the certainty of losing it could have accused him of not being
fairly sound in his conclusions. What had happened to Mrs. Halton to
make her so different to him (and, for that matter, to everybody else)
since four o'clock that afternoon he did not try to decide, since he had
no means of knowing.

But what he did know was that this was a woman of enchanting moods. At
one time she was good comrade,