'It isn't that. It's simply that we find a man can't keep a rowdy meeting in order as well as a woman.' He stared. 'You aren't serious?' said Lady John. 'Haven't you noticed,' Miss Levering put it to Trent, 'that all our worst disturbances come when men are in charge?' 'Ha! ha! Well--a--I hadn't connected the two ideas.' Still laughing a little ruefully, he suffered himself to be taken downstairs by kind little Miss Dunbarton, who had stood without a word waiting there with absent face. 'That nice boy's in love with you,' said Lady John, _sotto voce_. Vida looked at her without answering. 'Good-bye.' They shook hands. 'I _wish_ you hadn't been so unkind to that nice boy.' 'Do you?' 'Yes; for then I would be more sure of your telling Geoffrey Stonor that intelligent women don't nurse their wrongs indefinitely, and lie in wait to punish them.' 'You are _not_ sure?' Lady John went up close and looked into her face with searching anxiety. 'Are _you_?' she asked. Vida stood there mute, with eyes on the ground. Lady John glanced nervously at her watch, and, with a gesture of perturbation, hurriedly left the room. The other went slowly back to her place by the table. * * * * * The look she bent on Stonor as he came in seemed to take no account of those hurried glimpses at the Tunbridges' months before, and twice to-day when other eyes were watching. It was as if now, for the first time since they parted, he stood forth clearly. This man with the changed face, coming in at the door and carefully shutting it--he had once been Mystery's high priest and had held the keys of Joy. To-day, beyond a faint pallor, there was no trace of emotion in that face that was the same and yet so different. Not even anger there. Where a less complex man would have brought in, if not the menace of a storm, at least an intimation of masterfulness that should advertise the uselessness of opposition, Stonor brought a subtler ally in what, for lack of better words, must be called an air of heightened fastidiousness--mainly physical. Man has no shrewder weapon against the woman he has loved and wishes to exorcise from his path. For the simple, and even for those not so much simple as merely sensitive, there is something in that cool, sure assumption of unapproachableness on the part of one who once had been so near--something that lames advance and hypnotizes vision. Geoffrey Stonor's aloofness was not in the 'high look' alone; it was as much as anything in the very way he walked, as if the ground were hardly good enough, in the way he laid his shapely hand on the carved back of the sofa, the way his eyes rested on inanimate things in the room, reducing whoever was responsible for them to the need of justifying their presence and defending their value. As the woman in the chair, leaning cheek on hand, sat silently watching him, it may have been that obscure things in those headlong hours of the past grew plainer.