"I was not bored," she answers, simply; "I was quite happy. You see I did not know who was who, and I amused myself pairing the people: I find that I paired them all wrong, though." "Gave every man his neighbour's wife, did you? I dare say that some of them would not have objected to the arrangement." "I married _that_ old man" (indicating with the slightest possible motion of her head the persons alluded to) "to _that_ old woman; I wish it was not ill-manners to point. They both looked so red and pursy and consequential, as if they had been telling each other for the last thirty years what swells they were!" "_Which_ old man to _which_ old woman? Oh! I see." "They are rather like one another, too," she continues, gravely; "and you know people say that, however unlike they may be at starting, merely by dint of living together, man and wife grow alike." "Do they?" he says, a transient thought flashing through his mind as to whether, after twenty years of wedlock, that blooming peach face would have gained any likeness to his hard, mahogany one. "But how did you find out your mistake?" "He put down her cup for her so politely just now, that I knew he could not be her husband." He looks amused. "You are rather young to be so severe upon wedded bliss." "Was I severe?" she asks, naïvely; "I did not know it; but, you know, a man may be fond of his wife, may be kind to her, but can hardly be said to be _polite_: politeness implies distance." "Does it?" he says, involuntarily drawing his chair closer to hers, and leaning forward under pretence of looking at the flowers that make a scarlet fire in her hair. "By-the-by, how does the gum answer?" She forgets to reply to his harmless question, while her eyes fall troubled, half-frightened: the eyes that cannot, without a theft upon a third person, give him back his tender looks--the eyes in whose pupils Brandon is to see himself reflected for the next forty, fifty, sixty years. There is a little stir and flutter among the company: Belinda Denzil moving to the piano; a music-stool screwed up and down; gloves taken off; then a polite hush, infringed only by a country gentleman in the distance saying something rather loud about guano, while Belinda informs her assembled friends in a faint soprano that "He will return; she knows he will." She has made the same asseveration any time the last ten years; but he has not returned yet, and her relatives begin to be afraid that he never will. During the song Gerard falls into a reverie. At the end, coming out of it, he asks with an abrupt change of subject: "What did you say the name of your place was?" "Glan-yr-Afon." "Glan Ravvon?" (following her pronunciation.) "Yes; you would never guess that it was sounded _Glan Ravvon_ if you were to see it written: it is spelt quite differently." "What does it mean? or does it mean anything?" "It means 'Bank of the River;' so called, because it is not near the bank of any river."