at her
down decorous dinner-tables, and with the same fatal facility he had
displayed in getting at her, now keeping away from her, out of all
possible reach.

He was playing her own trick on her, but her chances for getting at him
again were fewer than his had been with her. She could not besiege him
in his abode; and in the places where they met, large houses crowded
with people, the eye of the world was upon her. For how long had she
forgotten it--she who had been all her life so deferential toward it!
Even now she remembered it only because it interfered with what she
wanted to do.

For the eye of her small society was very keenly upon Kerr. She
realized, all at once, that he had become a personage; and then, by
smiles, by lifted eyebrows, by glances, she gathered that her name was
being linked with his. She was astonished. How could their luncheon
together at the Purdies', their words that night in the opera box, their
few minutes' talk in the shop, have crystallized into this gossip? It
vexed her--alarmed her, how it had got about when she had seen him so
seldom, had known him scarcely more than a week. It was simply in the
air. It was in her attitude and in his, but how far it had gone she did
not dream, until in the dense crowd of some one's at-home she caught the
words of a young girl. The voice was so sweet and so prettily modulated
that at its first notes Flora turned involuntarily to glimpse the
speaker, a slender creature in a delicate mist of muslin, with an
indeterminate chin and the cheek of a pale peach.

"Just think," Flora heard her saying, "he went to see her three times in
two days, but to-day, did you notice, he wouldn't look at her until she
went up and spoke to him. I don't see how a girl can! Harry Cressy--"

She moved away and the words were lost. Flora looked after her. For the
moment she felt only scorn for the creatures who had clapped that
interpretation upon her great responsibility. These people around her
seemed poor indeed, absorbed only in petty considerations, and seeing
everything down the narrow vista of the "correct." Her eyes followed the
young girl's course through the room, easy to trace by her shining blond
head, and the unusual deliciousness of her muslin gown. She stopped
beside two women, and with a certain sense of pleasure and embarrassment
Flora recognized one of them--Mrs. Herrick. She caught the lady's eye
and bowed. Mrs. Herrick smiled, with a gracious inclination