But Mr. Boykin was tremulously alive to hints, and the conversation at once slid to safer topics, easy generalizations which left Madame de Treymes ample time to explore the table, to use her narrowed gaze like a knife slitting open the unsuspicious personalities about her. Nannie and Katy Durham, who, after much discussion (to which their hostess candidly admitted them), had been included in the feast, were the special objects of Madame de Treymes' observation. During dinner she ignored in their favour the other carefully-selected guests--the fashionable art-critic, the old Legitimist general, the beauty from the English Embassy, the whole impressive marshalling of Mrs. Boykin's social resources--and when the men returned to the drawing-room, Durham found her still fanning in his sisters the flame of an easily kindled enthusiasm. Since she could hardly have been held by the intrinsic interest of their converse, the sight gave him another swift intuition of the working of those hidden forces with which Fanny de Malrive felt herself encompassed. But when Madame de Treymes, at his approach, let him see that it was for him she had been reserving herself, he felt that so graceful an impulse needed no special explanation. She had the art of making it seem quite natural that they should move away together to the remotest of Mrs. Boykin's far-drawn salons, and that there, in a glaring privacy of brocade and ormolu, she should turn to him with a smile which avowed her intentional quest of seclusion. "Confess that I have done a great deal for you!" she exclaimed, making room for him on a sofa judiciously screened from the observation of the other rooms. "In coming to dine with my cousin?" he enquired, answering her smile. "Let us say, in giving you this half hour." "For that I am duly grateful--and shall be still more so when I know what it contains for me." "Ah, I am not sure. You will not like what I am going to say." "Shall I not?" he rejoined, changing colour. She raised her eyes from the thoughtful contemplation of her painted fan. "You appear to have no idea of the difficulties." "Should I have asked your help if I had not had an idea of them?" "But you are still confident that with my help you can surmount them?" "I can't believe you have come here to take that confidence from me?" She leaned back, smiling at him through her lashes. "And all this I am to do for your _beaux yeux?_" "No--for your own: that you may see with them what happiness you are conferring." "You are extremely clever, and I like you." She paused, and then brought out with lingering emphasis: "But my family will not hear of a divorce." She threw into her voice such an accent of finality that Durham, for the moment, felt himself brought up against an insurmountable barrier; but, almost at once, his fear was mitigated by the conviction that she would not have put herself out so much to say so little.