Altogether the aspect of things in general was sufficiently depressing. Then one afternoon she met Owen Kresney; and all at once life seemed to take on a new complexion. Here, at least, was some one who wanted her, when every one else seemed only to want Theo; some one who was really glad to see her--rather too emphatically glad, perhaps; but the eagerness of his greeting flattered her, and she had overlooked the rest. She had been returning in her jhampan from her melancholy outing to the Club, when he had caught sight of her in the distance, and cantering up to her side, had dismounted, and shaken hands as though they had not met for a year. "How awfully white and pulled down you look!" he had said with low-toned sympathy. "They must have been working you too hard. They forget that you are not a strapping woman like Miss Meredith." "No one has worked me too hard," she answered, flushing at the veiled implication against her husband. "I wanted to do as much as the others." "Of course you did. But you are too delicate to work like that, and it isn't fair to take advantage of your unselfishness. I hope you're going off to the Hills very soon, now that Desmond is better?" "Yes, I hope so too." Her voice had an unconscious weariness, and he bent a little closer, scanning her face with a concern that bordered on tenderness. "We have thought of you a great deal these two weeks, Mrs Desmond," he said. "We hardly cared to go out to tennis, or anything, while you were in such trouble. But now it has all come out right, you must be dreadfully in want of cheering up. Won't you come home with me and have a talk, like old times? Linda would be awfully pleased to see you again." The temptation was irresistible. It emphasised her vague sense of loneliness, of being left out in the cold. The longing to be comforted and made much of was strong upon her. "It is very nice of you to want me," she had said, as simply as a child. To which he had replied with prompt, if somewhat cheap, gallantry that no one could possibly help wanting her; and his reward had been a flush, as delicate in tint as the inner surface of a shell. This man had one strong point in his favour--he invariably talked to her about herself; a trick Desmond had never learnt, nor ever would. She had spent more than an hour in Miss Kresney's stuffy, dusty drawing-room, and had left it with a pleasantly revived sense of her own importance; had left Kresney himself in a state of carefully repressed triumph; for she had promised him an early morning ride in two days' time. It was all harmless enough so far as she was concerned--merely a case of flattered vanity and idle hands. But the strong nature, the large purpose, lies eternally at the mercy of life's little things.