one's misadventures were one's own fault. So
Pemberton waited in a queer confusion of yearning and alarm for the
catastrophe which was held to hang over the house of Moreen, of which he
certainly at moments felt the symptoms brush his cheek and as to which he
wondered much in what form it would find its liveliest effect.

Perhaps it would take the form of sudden dispersal--a frightened sauve
qui peut, a scuttling into selfish corners. Certainly they were less
elastic than of yore; they were evidently looking for something they
didn't find. The Dorringtons hadn't re-appeared, the princes had
scattered; wasn't that the beginning of the end? Mrs. Moreen had lost
her reckoning of the famous "days"; her social calendar was blurred--it
had turned its face to the wall. Pemberton suspected that the great, the
cruel discomfiture had been the unspeakable behaviour of Mr. Granger, who
seemed not to know what he wanted, or, what was much worse, what they
wanted. He kept sending flowers, as if to bestrew the path of his
retreat, which was never the path of a return. Flowers were all very
well, but--Pemberton could complete the proposition. It was now
positively conspicuous that in the long run the Moreens were a social
failure; so that the young man was almost grateful the run had not been
short. Mr. Moreen indeed was still occasionally able to get away on
business and, what was more surprising, was likewise able to get back.
Ulick had no club but you couldn't have discovered it from his
appearance, which was as much as ever that of a person looking at life
from the window of such an institution; therefore Pemberton was doubly
surprised at an answer he once heard him make his mother in the desperate
tone of a man familiar with the worst privations. Her question Pemberton
had not quite caught; it appeared to be an appeal for a suggestion as to
whom they might get to take Amy. "Let the Devil take her!" Ulick
snapped; so that Pemberton could see that they had not only lost their
amiability but had ceased to believe in themselves. He could also see
that if Mrs. Moreen was trying to get people to take her children she
might be regarded as closing the hatches for the storm. But Morgan would
be the last she would part with.

One winter afternoon--it was a Sunday--he and the boy walked far together
in the Bois de Boulogne. The evening was so splendid, the cold lemon-
coloured sunset so clear, the stream of carriages and pedes