Straker saw what Fanny had meant when she said that the young
girl had a temperament of her own--from Mr. Furnival. Her charming
smile implied that she was aware that Straker counted, and aware of
all that he had done for Furnival.

As he watched her he began to see how different she was from Nora
Viveash. She was grave and extraordinarily quiet, Furnival's young
girl. He measured the difference by the power she had of making
Furnival--as Straker put it--different from himself. She had made
him grave and quiet, too. Not that he had by any means lost his
engaging spontaneity; only the spontaneous, the ungovernable thing
about him was the divine shyness and the wonder which he was
utterly unable to conceal.

It was at its height, it had spread its own silence all around it,
when, in that stillness which was her hour, her moment, Philippa
appeared.

She came down the terrace, golden for her as it had been two years
ago; she came slowly, more slowly than ever, with a touch of
exaggeration in her rhythm, in her delay, in the poise of her head,
and in all her gestures; the shade too much that Straker had
malignly prophesied for her. But with it all she was more beautiful,
and, he could see, more dangerous, than ever.

She had greeted the three of them, Fanny, Brocklebank, and Straker,
with that increase, that excess of manner; and then she saw Furnival
standing very straight in front of her, holding out his hand.

"Mr. Furnival--but--how _nice_!"

Furnival had sat down again, rather abruptly, beside Molly Milner,
and Fanny, visibly perturbed, was murmuring the young girl's name.

Something passed over Miss Tarrant's face like the withdrawing of a
veil. She was not prepared for Molly Milner. She had not expected to
find anything like that at Amberley. It was not what she supposed
that Furnival had come for. But, whatever he had come for, that, the
unexpected, was what Furnival was there for now. It was
disconcerting.

Philippa, in fact, was disconcerted.

All this Straker took in; he took in also, in a flash, the look that
passed between Miss Tarrant and Miss Milner. Philippa's look was
wonderful, a smile flung down from her heights into the old dusty
lists of sex to challenge that young Innocence. Miss Milner's look
was even more wonderful than Philippa's; grave and abstracted, it
left Philippa's smile lying where she had flung it; she wasn't
going, it said, to take _that_ up.

And yet a duel went on between the