What has she to do amid all this movement and colour and gaiety? Because she has been dragged out of her darkness into light, and had her fetters suddenly knocked off, does that make her a fit member of this happy company? They look at her or she fancies so, strangely; some to whom she has been perfectly well known in former days, not even recognizing her. That she is changed in appearance she has long been indifferently aware; colour and flesh melted away in the smelting-pot of her great affliction, branded with the broad arrow of her uneffaceable suffering. But that she should have become unrecognizable! The unexpected smart of that discovery blinds her to the fact of how faint a hold upon another’s identity is possessed by any human being; of how small a change of costume, _locale_, or circumstance, will confuse the doubtful and inaccurate knowledge which we can master of even the exterior of our fellow-creatures! Nor does she realize that in the general centreing of attention on the objects of the entertainment, the unobtrusive addition of one more to the already considerable number of tall white maidens on the grounds may momentarily pass without notice. It is with relief and gratitude that, as she moves along in humiliated shyness, with that mazed sense of unreality which has been upon her ever since Mrs. Darcy’s morning visit, she hears herself interpolated by the familiar voice of Mrs. Prince. “Lavinia! Why, I can scarcely believe my eyes!” “_You_ at least know me!” replies the girl, holding out a hand that seems scarcely to belong to herself, in the unfamiliarity of its white glove. “Know you, my dear? Why should not I know you when I see you almost every day of my life? Why, in Heaven’s name, shouldn’t I know you?” “Other people don’t!” replies Lavinia, sombrely. “I passed Lady Greenhithe just now, and she looked perfectly blankly at me. And even Féodorovna; but then _she_ was----” Miss Carew apparently alters her intention of finishing her sentence, for she pauses. “Féodorovna!” repeats Mrs. Prince, an anxious furrow on her brow becoming suddenly more pronounced. “By-the-by, where is she? She disappeared almost as soon as we arrived. Did you say that you had seen her?” “Yes.” “Where?” “At the back of the tent.” “Was she--alone?” with a very apparent apprehension as to what the answer will be. “No--o; Mr. Sharp--the Shipstone organist, I mean--was with her.” Mrs. Prince heaves a mortified sigh that is yet tempered with philosophy. “I wish she had stuck to the army!” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “Neither Mr. Prince nor I would have objected to an army man!” CHAPTER XXVI “If I depart from thee I cannot live; And in thy sight to die, what were it else But like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?”