t half-ironic
thought; but the next moment, with a pang of compunction, he said to
himself that she had probably put it on for the same reason as before:
simply because she hadn't any other.

He looked at her in silence, and for an instant, above Effie's bobbing
head, she gave him back his look in a full bright gaze.

"Oh, there's Owen!" Effie cried, and whirled away down the gallery to
the door from which her step-brother was emerging. As Owen bent to catch
her, Sophy Viner turned abruptly back to Darrow.

"You, too?" she said with a quick laugh. "I didn't know----" And as Owen
came up to them she added, in a tone that might have been meant to reach
his ear: "I wish you all the luck that we can spare!"

About the dinner-table, which Effie, with Miss Viner's aid, had lavishly
garlanded, the little party had an air of somewhat self-conscious
festivity. In spite of flowers, champagne and a unanimous attempt at
ease, there were frequent lapses in the talk, and moments of nervous
groping for new subjects. Miss Painter alone seemed not only
unaffected by the general perturbation but as tightly sealed up in
her unconsciousness of it as a diver in his bell. To Darrow's strained
attention even Owen's gusts of gaiety seemed to betray an inward sense
of insecurity. After dinner, however, at the piano, he broke into a mood
of extravagant hilarity and flooded the room with the splash and ripple
of his music.

Darrow, sunk in a sofa corner in the lee of Miss Painter's granite
bulk, smoked and listened in silence, his eyes moving from one figure to
another. Madame de Chantelle, in her armchair near the fire, clasped her
little granddaughter to her with the gesture of a drawing-room Niobe,
and Anna, seated near them, had fallen into one of the attitudes of
vivid calm which seemed to Darrow to express her inmost quality. Sophy
Viner, after moving uncertainly about the room, had placed herself
beyond Mrs. Leath, in a chair near the piano, where she sat with head
thrown back and eyes attached to the musician, in the same rapt fixity
of attention with which she had followed the players at the Francais.
The accident of her having fallen into the same attitude, and of her
wearing the same dress, gave Darrow, as he watched her, a strange sense
of double consciousness. To escape from it, his glance turned back to
Anna; but from the point at which he was placed his eyes could not
take in the one face without the other, and that renewed th