Somewhat to her disgust, Hilda Compton found as she proceeded that it was impossible to give such significance to her words as she would have wished. She realised that it would never do to allow herself to be brought to book, and consequently conventionality demanded that she should adopt a jesting tone, and trust to Mrs. Romayne’s possessing some half knowledge which should give the words the barb she wished for them. She had a pleasant conviction, as Mrs. Romayne answered her, that she had done something, at least, towards wiping out that old score. The elder woman’s words were preceded by a harsh little laugh, and there was something indistinct about their utterance. “Just so. Who would have thought----” Mrs. Romayne stopped abruptly, and a sharp, extraordinary spasm passed across her face, leaving it fixed and old. The girl by her side could not flatter herself that the effect was produced by her words, for Mrs. Romayne was gazing to the other side of the garden, and it was evidently something she had seen there which had affected her so powerfully. Turning her own curious eyes in the same direction, Hilda Compton saw nothing calculated to account for such an effect. The crowd had drifted away to some extent to the other lawn, and the tennis-courts, and there was a considerable space, sparsely sprinkled with people, between where they stood and the last group on the lawn; a group of ladies to whom the host was introducing a little alert, elderly man with grey hair; a little man who looked to-day--though only one pair of the two pair of women’s eyes fixed upon him across the lawn recognised this--exactly as he had looked twenty years ago. Hilda Compton did not know him, and she was wondering curiously whether Mrs. Romayne did, when she heard their hostess’s voice and turned quickly. Mrs. Romayne, roused apparently by finding herself addressed, had turned also--very quickly it seemed to Hilda Compton, and rather as though she did not wish her face to be seen by some one on the other side of the garden--and was listening with a dazed, strained expression of enforced attention. “I want to introduce a connexion of mine, my dear Mrs. Romayne. Something of a traveller, and something of an eccentricity; but, really, worth talking to. There he is!” indicating the little alert, elderly man on the other side of the lawn. “He is a Dr. Aston. May I fetch him?” To Hilda Compton’s astonishment Mrs. Romayne stretched out her hand hurriedly in unmistakeable dissent, and it was shaking like a leaf. “I’m afraid I must say ‘no,’” she said, in a hoarse, hurried tone which sounded as though she could hardly control it. “I have a long drive, you know, and I must run away.” She took her leave so briefly and hurriedly that her hostess came to the conclusion that illness must be the cause of the seclusion in which she was living, and that she must have miscalculated her strength that afternoon.