Claude Heath was in the room with Mrs. Mansfield. As Charmian looked at
him getting quickly up from the sofa where he had been sitting he seemed
to her a stranger. Was this really the man who had made her suffer,
weep, confide in Susan Fleet, in Algeria? Had pink roses and dust,
far-off and near sounds, movements and stillnesses, and that strange
little island spoken to her of him, prophesied to her about him? She had
a sense of banality, of disillusion, as if all that had been in her own
brain only, almost crazily conceived without any action of events to
prompt it.

But when she met his eyes the disagreeable sensation dropped away. For
his eyes searched her in a way that made her feel suddenly important. He
was looking for Africa, but she did not know it.

Although he did not see what Charmian had done to her face, he noticed
change in her. She seemed to him more of a personage than she had seemed
before she went away. He was not sure that he liked the change. But it
made an impression upon him. And what he considered as the weakness
within him felt a desire to please and conciliate it.

Mrs. Mansfield had seen at a glance that Charmian had touched up her
face, but she showed nothing of what she felt, if she felt anything,
about this new departure. And when Heath said to Charmian, "How well you
are looking!" Mrs. Mansfield added:

"Your rest has done you good."

"Yes, I feel rather less idiotic!" said Charmian; "but only rather. You
mustn't expect me to be quite my usual brilliant self, Mr. Heath. You
must wait a day or two for that. What have you been doing all this
time?"

It seemed to Heath that there was a hint of light patronage in her tone
and manner. He was unpleasantly conscious of the woman of the world. But
he did not realize how much Charmian had to conceal at this moment.

When almost immediately they went in to dinner, Mrs. Mansfield
deliberately turned the conversation to Charmian's recent journey. This
was to be Charmian's dinner. Charmian was the interesting person, the
traveller from Algeria. Had not Claude Heath been invited to hear all
about the trip? Mrs. Mansfield remembered the imaginative look which had
transformed his face just before he had quoted Chateaubriand. And she
remembered something else, something Charmian had once said to her: "You
jump into minds and hearts and poor little I remain outside, squatting,
like a hungry child!" She had a sincere horror of the elderly mother who