The question gave Miss Scrotton an opportunity for almost ominous emphasis; she paused over it, holding Mrs. Forrester with a brooding eye. "He won't bore her," she then brought out. "What, never? never?" Mrs. Forrester questioned gaily. "Never, never," Miss Scrotton repeated. "He is too clever. He will keep her interested--and uncertain." "Well," Mrs. Forrester returned, as if this were all to the good, "it is a comfort to think that the poor darling has found a distraction." "You feel it that? I wish I could. I wish I could feel it anything but an infatuation. If only he weren't so much the type of a great woman's folly; if only he weren't so of the region of whispers. It isn't like our wonderful Sir Alliston; one sees her there standing high on a mountain peak with the winds of heaven about her. To see her with Mr. Drew is like seeing her through some ambiguous, sticky fog. Oh, I can't deny that it has all made me very, very unhappy." Tears blinked in Miss Scrotton's eyes. Mrs. Forrester was kind, she leaned forward and patted Miss Scrotton's hand, she smiled reassuringly, and she refused, for a moment, to share her anxiety. "No, no, no," she said, "you are troubling yourself quite needlessly, my dear Eleanor. Mercedes is amusing herself and the young man is an interesting young man; she has talked to me and written to me about him. And I think she needed distraction just now, I think this marriage of little Karen's has affected her a good deal. The child is of course connected in her mind with so much that is dear and tragic in the past." "Oh, Karen!" said Miss Scrotton, who, drying her eyes, had accepted Mrs. Forrester's consolations with a slight sulkiness, "she hasn't given a thought to Karen, I can assure you." "No; you can't assure me, Eleanor," Mrs. Forrester returned, now with a touch of severity. "I don't think you quite understand how deep a bond of that sort can be for Mercedes--even if she seldom speaks of it. She has written to me very affectingly about it. I only hope she will not take it to heart that they could not wait for her. I could not blame them. Everything was arranged; a house in the Highlands lent to them for the honeymoon." "Take it to heart? Dear me no; she won't like it, probably; but that is a different matter." "Gregory is radiant, you know." "Is he?" said Miss Scrotton gloomily. "I wish I could feel radiant about that match; but I can't. I did hope that Gregory would marry well." "It isn't perhaps quite what one would have expected for him," Mrs. Forrester conceded; "but she is a dear girl. She behaved very prettily while she was here with Lady Jardine." "Did she? It is a very different marriage, isn't it, from the one that Mercedes had thought suitable. She told you, I suppose, about Franz Lippheim." "Yes; I heard about that. Mercedes was a good deal disappointed. She is very much attached to the young man and thought that Karen was, too. I have never seen him."