te from
Mrs. Lowndes asking her to dine that evening, she accepted with a plan
in mind. Before she saw Ewing she would try to learn something about him
from Sydenham, for Sydenham would also dine with Mrs. Lowndes, and she
knew that Ewing had been painting with the old man.

She found Birley the other guest, and that, too, was customary. Birley
and Sydenham preserved for their hostess a certain aroma of her youth.
Both had wooed her in the long ago; Sydenham in a day when Long Branch
was. On its sands in the light of a July moon she had prettily hoped
they might always be friends. Birley had heard her intone the same
becoming sentiment at Saratoga later in the season. And both rejected
ones had been present at St. Paul's on a day in the following June when
Kitty Folsom and Jack Lowndes had consented together in holy wedlock.

The girl's hope, perfunctory enough at the time, one may fear, had seen
long years of fruition. She liked to have them at her table now. Only,
when the three were alone, they remembered too vividly and became, in
the silences, too fantastically unlike their aged selves to the misty
eyes of one another. The one-time belle found a little of that
forgetting and remembering to be salutary, so little as ensued when a
fourth guest was present. And Eleanor Laithe had often been that fourth,
a saving reminder of the present, to recall them when they had loitered
far enough back into the old marrying years.

But she came this night with a reason beyond her wish to please. So
eager was she to ask Sydenham about Ewing that she gave scant attention
to the searching looks and queries of Birley when she entered the
drawing room. The big man rallied her on her pallor and frailness, but
with a poor spirit that hardly concealed his real misgiving. She
silenced him with impatient denials of illness, but his eyes lingered
anxiously on her face.

She sat at table with but half an ear for their old-time gossip, the
bantering gallantries of the aged swains, and the outworn coquetries of
the one-time beauty. And when they fell silent--oftener now than was
their wont, for each was thinking of that other Kitty Lowndes, who had
taken matters into her own hands--she forgot to make talk, silent
herself for thinking on the son of that Kitty. The dinner lacked the
sparkle she had been expected to give it.

As they were about to rise, after coffee, she playfully petitioned for a
chat with Sydenham.

"Herbert wants to smok