I lashed myself up to being almost talkative. I am sure they never guessed the effort I was making. I had not taken my usual place for pouring out tea. I sat where I could see the gate. My mind and eyes were so on the watch for Eric I should not have noticed Ranny much, but for an odd new feeling of comradeship that sprang up, I cannot tell how, as the minutes went by and still brought no sign of Eric. Not even a note in answer to mine. As tea went on, and I grew more miserable, I noticed that Ranny flagged, too. After saying something Ranny-ish enough, he would fall into quiet, looking straight in front of him as though we none of us were there. As though even Bettina were not there. Bettina's eyes kept turning his way. But Ranny never once looked at her. And the more I looked at him, the more I felt he was changed. He would rouse himself abruptly out of that new stillness and take part for a moment in the talk. His very laugh, that I have spoken of as so reassuring--his laugh most of all gave me a sense of uneasiness. It was a kind of laughter that seemed just a tribute to other people's light-heartedness and, more than anything about him, a betrayal of his own bankruptcy in cheer. When he fell silent again, and in a way "out of the running," when that blindness came into his face, Ranny Dallas looks as I feel, I said to myself. And then I talked the more and smiled at everybody in a way probably more imbecile than pleasing. I consoled myself with thinking neither Ranny nor I were being much noticed, for Hermione talked very fast, and rather louder than usual, to Bettina and to the other, newer, swain--one of the apparently endless supply of "weak-ending young men" as Ranny called them. Under cover of Hermione's gaiety, I managed to ask Bettina what was the matter with Ranny. "I don't know," she whispered. I saw it was true. Bettina did not know. She leaned across me to find a place on the crowded table for her teacup and the low voice was earnest enough: "_Find out._" The rain had been only a passing shower. "Oh, yes, the sun has come out--but my father hasn't! Didn't I say," Hermione laughed, "no man ever knows when to come away from this place?" Then she swept us all into the garden. "If he doesn't come soon I shall throw gravel up at the window. Isn't it this window?" Bettina said very likely Lord Helmstone was having tea upstairs and that it had not gone up till after ours. Ranny and I left the new young man and Bettina trying to prevent Hermione from carrying out her audacious plan and apparently succeeding. For Lord Helmstone did not appear for another half-hour. And still no sign of Eric.