Gertrude was in a very amiable mood. She congratulated Eugenia on looking so well--"Ever so much better than she had expected to see her," while wondering in her secret heart at the sad change in her sister-in-law's looks. "It must be partly her clothes," she decided, and marvelled more that her brother allowed her to wear such "atrociously made mourning." She sighed as she reflected what a different wife she would have liked to see at the head of her brother's table, and sighed again as she remembered her own short-sightedness in another direction. But her sighs were upstairs in her own room. Downstairs, she was amiability and liveliness itself. She talked, and laughed, and asked questions about the neighbours and neighbourhood, to which nearly all the answers came from Beauchamp--for in most instances Eugenia's information was at fault, her interest palpably languid. Yet when Gertrude turned from her with a patronising "Oh, no, of course, you have not met them--it was when you were ill;" or "Ah, yes, I remember you were not there," Eugenia felt unreasonably indignant. Altogether, this first evening left her with a mortifying sensation of being an outsider in her own home; she felt again the same sensation of loneliness and isolation, of being in no wise essential to her husband's well-being, which had so depressed her the first evening at Winsley. And more bitterly than ever her thoughts went back over and over again to the irreparable past. "Aunty," inquired Floss, a day or two after this, when she was alone with Eugenia, "are you as pwetty as you used to be?" The stare of the blue-green eyes was rather disconcerting. "I don't know, Moss," said Eugenia. "I daresay not, but it doesn't matter. What makes you ask?" "What does `failed off' mean?" continued Floss, pursuing her own train of thought. "I won't answer silly questions, Floss," replied her aunt, her face flushing, nevertheless. "'Tisn't silly," said Floss, indignantly. "Big people said it. Mamma said you had failed off _tewibly_, and Uncle Beachey looked cross and said it was your own fault. I don't think Uncle Beachey is nice at all. He spoke so cwoss. I thought falling off meant tumbling and hurting yourself, but it doesn't. It's something about being pwetty and ugly. And mamma said she wished she hadn't interfered once, and then somebody else who wouldn't have failed off would have been here. Does it mean about widing? Everybody says Aunty Woma looks pwetty widing, and I _know_ mamma meant her." So far, in a sort of stupor of bewildered amazement, Eugenia had listened in silence to the child's curiously jumbled revelation. Suddenly she recollected herself. "Floss," she said, sternly, "you must not repeat what you were not meant to hear, and I will not listen to you."