"Do we ever tell each other our annoyances? I think we sit and look at each other, and discover them. That is much more appropriate." "You take things too seriously," she went on; "my dear, they are really not worth it. That is my settled conviction." She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of laughter"--a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic--in the decent drapery of her fictitious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her expressive eyebrows. "You are wonderful," he exclaimed, after an interval, "wonderful; that was what I was thinking." She smiled disinterestedly. "Because you don't understand me? My dear, nothing is so easy as mystification; that is why I don't return the compliment. Yourself, you know, are not very intelligible to-night." He looked away frowning, but without embarrassment; presently throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he remarked: "I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can't. I am unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find Mary." "Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary yet; smoke another cigarette." He took one and lit it, absently, in the blue flame of the spirit-lamp, and she watched him closely with her bright, curious eyes. "You know this Mr. Lightmark very well, don't you, Philip?" "Intimately," he answered, nodding. "You must be pleased," she said. "It is a great match for him, a struggling artist. Can he paint, by the way?" "He has great talent." He held his cigarette away from him, considered the ash critically. "Yes, he can certainly paint. I suppose it is a good thing--and for Eve, too. Why should it not be?" "He is a charming young man"--she spoke judicially--"charming! But in effect Mary was quite right; she generally is--he is not sincere." "I think you are wrong," said Rainham after a moment. "I should be sorry to believe you were not, for the little girl's sake. And I have known him a long time; he is a good fellow at bottom." "Ah!" cried Lady Garnett with a little, quick gesture of her right hand, "that is precisely what he is not. He exaggerates; he must be very secret; no one ever was so frank as he seems to be." "Why are you saying all this to me?" the other asked after a moment. "You know I should be very sorry; but what can I do? it's arranged."