should do?"

Mrs. Brook, in her apprehension, had looked expressively at their
friends, but the eye of the Duchess wandered no further than Harold and
Lady Fanny. "It would perhaps serve to keep that pair a little longer
from escaping together."

Mrs. Brook took a pause no greater. "But wouldn't it be, as regards
another pair, locking the stable-door after--what do you call it? Don't
Petherton and Aggie appear already to have escaped together? Mitchy,
man, where in the world's your wife?"

"I quite grant you," said the Duchess gaily, "that my niece is wherever
Petherton is. This I'm sure of, for THERE'S a friendship, if you please,
that has not been interrupted. Petherton's not gone, is he?" she asked
in her turn of Mitchy.

But again before he could speak it was taken up. "Mitchy's silent,
Mitchy's altered, Mitchy's queer!" Mrs. Brook proclaimed, while the new
recruits to the circle, Tishy and Nanda and Mr. Cashmore, Lady Fanny and
Harold too after a minute and on perceiving the movement of the others,
ended by enlarging it, with mutual accommodation and aid, to a pleasant
talkative ring in which the subject of their companion's demonstration,
on a low ottoman and glaring in his odd way in almost all directions at
once, formed the conspicuous attractive centre. Tishy was nearest
Mr. Longdon, and Nanda, still flanked by Mr. Cashmore, between that
gentleman and his wife, who had Harold on her other side. Edward
Brookenham was neighboured by his son and by Vanderbank, who might
easily have felt himself, in spite of their separation and given, as it
happened, their places in the group, rather publicly confronted with Mr.
Longdon. "Is his wife in the other room?" Mrs. Brook now put to Tishy.

Tishy, after a stare about, recovered the acuter consciousness to
account for this guest. "Oh yes--she's playing with him."

"But with whom, dear?"

"Why, with Petherton. I thought you knew."

"Knew they're playing---?" Mrs. Brook was almost Socratic.

"The Missus is regularly wound up," her husband meanwhile, without
resonance, observed to Vanderbank.

"Brilliant indeed!" Vanderbank replied.

"But she's rather naughty, you know," Edward after a pause continued.

"Oh fiendish!" his interlocutor said with a short smothered laugh that
might have represented for a spectator a sudden start at such a flash of
analysis from such a quarter.

When Vanderbank's attention at any rate was free again their hostess,
assisted to the