he effect of all of which was to make me ask myself what she
could have been doing to him. Making love, possibly--yet from that he
would scarce have appealed. She wouldn't, on the other hand, have given
him her company only to be inhuman. I joined them, at all events,
learning from Mrs. Server that she had come by a train previous to my
own; and we made a slow trio till, at a turn of the prospect, we came
upon another group. It consisted of Mrs. Froome and Lord Lutley and of
Gilbert Long and Lady John--mingled and confounded, as might be said,
not assorted according to tradition. Long and Mrs. Froome came first, I
recollect, together, and his lordship turned away from Lady John on
seeing me rather directly approach her. She had become for me, on the
spot, as interesting as, while we travelled, I had found my two friends
in the train. As the source of the flow of "intellect" that had
transmuted our young man, she had every claim to an earnest attention;
and I should soon have been ready to pronounce that she rewarded it as
richly as usual. She was indeed, as Mrs. Briss had said, as pointed as a
hat-pin, and I bore in mind that lady's injunction to look in her for
the answer to our riddle.

The riddle, I may mention, sounded afresh to my ear in Gilbert Long's
gay voice; it hovered there--before me, beside, behind me, as we all
paused--in his light, restless step, a nervous animation that seemed to
multiply his presence. He became really, for the moment, under this
impression, the thing I was most conscious of; I heard him, I felt him
even while I exchanged greetings with the sorceress by whose wand he had
been touched. To be touched myself was doubtless not quite what I
wanted; yet I wanted, distinctly, a glimpse; so that, with the smart
welcome Lady John gave me, I might certainly have felt that I was on the
way to get it. The note of Long's predominance deepened during these
minutes in a manner I can't describe, and I continued to feel that
though we pretended to talk it was to him only we listened. He had us
all in hand; he controlled for the moment all our attention and our
relations. He was in short, as a consequence of our attitude, in
possession of the scene to a tune he couldn't have dreamed of a year or
two before--inasmuch as at that period he could have figured at no such
eminence without making a fool of himself. And the great thing was that
if his eminence was now so perfectly graced he yet knew less than any