Then the portières between the parlour and the hall parted. Enid appeared muffled to the chin in a green-velvet cape edged with soft gray fur. Over the top of her spiralling mop of hair towered Eugene Walter. Matilda gasped and her despair sharpened. It was wretchedly evident that in the glow of Enid’s pride in being reappropriated by him and under the unbearable intensity of her own need of him, Eugene Walter had taken on some of the remote perfection of an Adonis and the poetic dignity of a Galahad. He paused in front of the rack and took down his hat--the very hat that had lain crushed between them last night on that bench by the Lake when he had all but promised her the Mediterranean. Matilda made a brown blot against the wall and somehow managed to ascend three steps. “If there isn’t Miss Gessler!” lilted Enid, nudging Eugene. Matilda turned and looked unseeingly down into their faces. She felt curiously like a person who had died and after a fitting funeral had had the bad taste to come back to life. “We thought you’d gone,” said Enid, balancing her fairy proportions against her escort. “I’m going,” apologized Matilda dully, “in the morning.” “How distressing!” exclaimed Eugene nervously, twirling his hat. “How funny!” chanted Enid, laying her white fingers on his sleeve. “Is there anything I can do?” he said with that cool, impersonal courtesy which is not meant to be taken advantage of. “No, thank you,” answered Matilda mechanically, heavily, mounting another step. “Good-bye then, _Mathilde_ ... and good luck!” he called up to her, feigning a casualness he clearly did not feel. He made a forward motion as if to take her hand, but Enid with birdlike deftness fluttered in front of him and sank gracefully down on the bottom step. “My slipper’s unfastened,” she murmured. He knelt and took the slender golden foot in his hand. Matilda gained the upper hall. Just as she turned to enter her room she glimpsed Flora’s coloured bulk in close communion with Mrs. Kelsey’s gray dumpiness. Matilda clenched her fists. How fast they must have tossed her name about at dinner and with what eager celerity they must have sprayed it with venom! And there was Eugene. How easily he was filling the gap between dessert and bedtime with the fluffy green and gold that was Enid! And yet if those two hens had held their tongues she might have....