eat difference in
her. She had come back more of a personage, more resolute. He felt the
will in her as he had not felt it before. Till she came back he had only
felt the strong soul in her mother. That was like an unwavering flame.
How Mrs. Mansfield's husband must have loved her.

And Heath's hands slipped from the piano, and he dreamed over women.

He was conscious of solitude.

Susan Fleet was now in town. After the trip to Algiers she had been to
Folkestone to visit her mother and dear old Mrs. Simpkins. She had also
combined business with pleasure and been fitted for a new coat and
skirt. A long telegram from Adelaide Shiffney called her back to London
to under-take secretarial and other duties. As the season approached
Mrs. Shiffney's life became increasingly agitated. Miss Fleet was an
excellent hand at subduing, or, if that were impossible, at getting
neatness into agitation. She knew well how to help fashionable women to
be absurd with method. She made their silliness almost business-like,
and assisted them to arrange their various fads in apple-pie order. Amid
their often hysterical lives she moved with a coolness that was
refreshing even to them. She never criticized their actions except
sometimes by tacitly declining to join in them. And they seldom really
wanted her to do that. Her value to them would have been diminished, if
not destroyed, had she been quite as they were.

For the moment she was in Grosvenor Square.

Charmian envied Adelaide Shiffney. But she was resolved to see more of
Miss Fleet at whatever cost. Recently she had been conscious of a tiny
something, not much more than a thread, dividing her from her mother.
Since her mother knew that she had made up her face on Claude Heath's
account, she had often felt self-conscious at home. Knowing that, her
mother, of course, knew more. If Charmian had told the truth she would
not have minded the fact that it was known. But she did mind very much
its being known when she had not told it. Sometimes she said to herself
that she was being absurd, that Mrs. Mansfield knew, even suspected,
nothing. But unfortunately she was a woman and, therefore, obliged to be
horribly intelligent in certain directions. Her painted cheeks and
delicately-darkened eyelashes had spoken what her lips had never said.
It was vain to pretend the contrary. And she sedulously pretended it.

Her sense of separation from her mother made Charmian the more desirous
of further i