“My dear Mrs. Hazeldean, you look a little pale. Are you cold? Shall I get you some champagne?” Sillerton Jackson was officiously suggesting. “If you think the other women look blooming! My dear man, it’s this hideous vulgar overhead lighting....” She rose impatiently. It had occurred to her that the thing to do--the “natural” thing--would be to stroll up to Jinny Lyman, over whom Prest was still attentively bending. _Then_ people would see if she was nervous, or ill--or afraid! But half-way she stopped and thought: “Suppose the Parretts and Wessons _did_ see me? Then my joining Jinny while he’s talking to her will look--how will it look?” She began to regret not having had it out on the spot with Sillerton Jackson, who could be trusted to hold his tongue on occasion, especially if a pretty woman threw herself on his mercy. She glanced over her shoulder as if to call him back; but he had turned away, been absorbed into another group, and she found herself, instead, abruptly face to face with Sabina Wesson. Well, perhaps that was better still. After all, it all depended on how much Mrs. Wesson had seen, and what line she meant to take, supposing she _had_ seen anything. She was not likely to be as inscrutable as old Sillerton. Lizzie wished now that she had not forgotten to go to Mrs. Wesson’s last party. “Dear Mrs. Wesson, it was so kind of you--” But Mrs. Wesson was not there. By the exercise of that mysterious protective power which enables a woman desirous of not being waylaid to make herself invisible, or to transport herself, by means imperceptible, to another part of the earth’s surface, Mrs. Wesson, who, two seconds earlier, appeared in all her hard handsomeness to be bearing straight down on Mrs. Hazeldean, with a scant yard of clear _parquet_ between them--Mrs. Wesson, as her animated back and her active red fan now called on all the company to notice, had never been there at all, had never seen Mrs. Hazeldean (“_Was_ she at Mrs. Struthers’s last Sunday? How odd! I must have left before she got there--“), but was busily engaged, on the farther side of the piano, in examining a picture to which her attention appeared to have been called by the persons nearest her. “Ah, how _life-like_! That’s what I always feel when I see a Meissonier,” she was heard to exclaim, with her well-known instinct for the fitting epithet. Lizzie Hazeldean stood motionless. Her eyes dazzled as if she had received a blow on the forehead. “So _that’s_ what it feels like!” she thought. She lifted her head very high, looked about her again, tried to signal to Henry Prest, but saw him still engaged with the lovely Mrs. Lyman, and at the same moment caught the glance of young Hubert Wesson, Sabina’s eldest, who was standing in disengaged expectancy near the supper-room door.