"My father gave Tom Verity letters of introduction, and he wanted us to know how kindly he had been received in consequence." "Most proper on his part," Mrs. Frayling said. She debated discreet questioning, probing--the establishment of herself in the character of sympathetic confidante. But decided against that. It might be impolitic, dangerous even, to press the pace. Moreover the young man, whatever his attractions, might be held a negligible quantity in as far as any little schemes of her own were concerned at present, long leave and reappearance upon the home scene being almost certainly years distant.--And, just there, the hand within the muff became responsive once more, even urgent in its seeking and pressure, as though appealing for attention and tenderness. "Henrietta, I don't want to be selfish, but won't you go on telling me stories about your Thursday party people?--I interrupted you--but it's all new, you see, and it interests me so much," Damaris rather plaintively said. Mrs. Frayling needed no further inducement to exercise her really considerable powers of verbal delineation. Charging her palette with lively colours, she sprang to the task--and that with a sprightly composure and deftness of touch which went far to cloak malice and rob flippancy of offence. Listening, Damaris brightened--as the adroit performer intended she should--under the gay cascade of talk. Laughed at length, letting finer instincts of charity go by the wall, in her enjoyment of neatly turned mockeries and the sense of personal superiority they provoked. For Henrietta's dissection of the weaknesses of absent friends, inevitably amounted to indirect flattery of the friend for whose diversion that process of dissection was carried out. She passed the whole troop in review.--To begin with Miss Maud Callowgas, in permanent waiting upon her ex-semi-episcopal widowed mother--in age a real thirty-five though nominal twenty-eight, her muddy complexion, prominent teeth and all too long back.--Her designs, real or imagined, upon Marshall Wace. Designs foredoomed to failure, since whatever his intentions--Henrietta smiled wisely--they certainly did not include Maud Callowgas's matrimonial future in their purview.