More than one of the people who had talked to Mrs. Romayne in the interval had been vaguely aware of a certain incontrollable preoccupation behind her manner; though the intense, suppressed excitement in which that preoccupation originated passed undetected. Her restless eyes fastened upon Miss Pomeroy and Julian on the very instant of their reappearance in the room, and as they came towards her that excitement leapt up suddenly and lit up her whole face with a wild flash of hope and anticipation. They drew nearer and it died down again even more suddenly than it had sprung up; and in its passing it seemed to have aged her face curiously, and to have left upon it a stamp of heart-sick disappointment, touched with a creeping anxiety. Miss Pomeroy was pale, and her usual still placidity seemed to be accentuated into absolute stupidity. Julian’s face was quite colourless, and beneath the travesty of his usual manner which he assumed in speaking to his mother, there was an indefinable expression which made him look ten years older and twenty years harder and more bitter. Scruples on his part as to crushing their dress prevented his going home with them. He would follow in a hansom, he said. But before he arrived Miss Pomeroy had said good night to Mrs. Romayne with a neatly-turned and quite meaningless expression of the pleasure the evening had given her, and had retired to her room. Mrs. Romayne, looking haggard and worn, lingered until Julian came in, and went out to meet him. “Good night, mother,” he said, and went straight upstairs without pausing. It was many, many years since he had left her at night without a kiss; and as Mrs. Romayne went slowly up to her room through the silent house, she stumbled once or twice as though her wide, dry eyes hardly saw the stairs before her.