"Oh, I don't know. I suppose it would have been called rather intellectual." Mrs. Bowen smiled infinitesimally. But after a moment she said gravely, "Mr. Colville is very much older than you. He's old enough to be your father." "Yes, I know that. You feel that he feels old, and it's perfectly tragical. Sometimes when he turns that slow, dull, melancholy look on you, he seems a thousand years old." "I don't mean that he's positively old," said Mrs. Bowen. "He's only old comparatively." "Oh yes; I understand that. And I don't mean that he really seems a thousand years old. What I meant was, he seems a thousand years off, as if he were still young, and had got left behind somehow. He seems to be on the other side of some impassable barrier, and you want to get over there and help him to our side, but you can't do it. I suppose his talking in that light way is merely a subterfuge to hide his feeling, to make him forget." Mrs. Bowen fingered the edges of her book. "You mustn't let your fancy run away with you, Imogene," she said, with a little painful smile. "Oh, I _like_ to let it run away with me. And when I get such a subject as Mr. Colville, there's no stopping. I can't stop, and I don't _wish_ to stop. Shouldn't you have thought that he would have been perfectly crushed at the exhibition he made of himself in the Lancers last night? He wasn't the least embarrassed when he met me, and the only allusion he made to it was to say that he had been up late, and had danced too much. Wasn't it wonderful he could do it? Oh, if _I_ could do that!" "I wish he could have avoided the occasion for his bravado," said Mrs. Bowen. "I think I was a little to blame, perhaps," said the girl. "I beckoned him to come and take the vacant place." "I don't see that that was an excuse," returned Mrs. Bowen primly. Imogene seemed insensible to the tone, as it concerned herself; it only apparently reminded her of something. "Guess what Mr. Colville said, when I had been silly, and then tried to make up for it by being very dignified all of a sudden?" "I don't know. How had you been silly?" The servant brought in some cards. Imogene caught up the pelisse which she had been gradually shedding as she sat talking to Mrs. Bowen, and ran out of the room by another door. They did not recur to the subject. But that night, when Mrs. Bowen went to say good night to Effie, after the child had gone to bed, she lingered. "Effie," she said at last, in a husky whisper, "what did Imogene say to Mr. Colville to-day that made him laugh?" "I don't know," said the child. "They kept laughing at so many things." "Laughing?" "Yes; he laughed. Do you mean toward the last, when he had been throwing stones into the river?" "It must have been then."