It couldn’t be said of Edward Brookenham, who seemed to bend for sitting down more hinges than most men, that he looked as if he knew either this or anything else. He had a pale cold face, marked and made regular, made even in a manner handsome, by a hardness of line in which, oddly, there was no significance, no accent. Clean-shaven, slightly bald, with unlighted grey eyes and a mouth that gave the impression of not working easily, he suggested a stippled drawing by an inferior master. Lean moreover and stiff, and with the air of having here and there in his person a bone or two more than his share, he had once or twice, at fancy-balls, been thought striking in a dress copied from one of Holbein’s English portraits. But when once some such meaning as that had been put into him it took a long time to put another, a longer time than even his extreme exposure or anybody’s study of the problem had yet made possible. If anything particular had finally been expected from him it might have been a summary or an explanation of the things he had always not said; but there was something in him that had long since pacified all impatience, drugged all curiosity. He had never in his life answered such a question as his wife had just put him and which she would not have put had she feared a reply. So dry and decent and even distinguished did he look, as if he had positively been created to meet a propriety and match some other piece, that lady, with her famous perceptions, would no more have appealed to him seriously on a general proposition than she would, for such a response, have rung the drawing-room bell. He was none the less held to have a great promiscuous wisdom. “What is it that’s between them?” he demanded. “What’s between any woman and the man she’s making up to?” “Why there may often be nothing. I didn’t know she even particularly knew him,” Brookenham added. “It’s exactly what she would like to prevent any one’s knowing, and her coming here to be with him when she knows I know SHE knows--don’t you see?--that he’s to be here, is just one of those calculations that ARE subtle enough to put off the scent a woman who has but half a nose.” Mrs. Brookenham as she spoke appeared to attest by the pretty star-gazing way she thrust it into the air her own possession of the totality of such a feature. “I don’t know yet quite what I think, but one wakes up to such things soon enough.” “Do you suppose it’s her idea that he’ll marry her?” Brookenham asked in his colourless way. “My dear Edward!” his wife murmured for all answer. “But if she can see him in other places why should she want to see him here?” Edward persisted in a voice destitute of expression. Mrs. Brookenham now had plenty of that. “Do you mean if she can see him in his own house?” “No cream, please,” her husband said. “Hasn’t she a house too?” “Yes, but so pervaded all over by Aggie and Miss Merriman.” “Oh!” Brookenham commented.