David found, as he talked, no need of the effort of attention. This Mr. Fennido did not notice him at all. He seemed to hold Constance Bardale with his eyes, the group about him with his shoulders that were curiously sharp above so plump a body. He was done. There was a breaking up. A new shredding of words, a new scramble from which another voice emerged, momently mastered attention, sank away. David watched Tom. Not consciously so much as because he nearly always saw him, when Tom was there to see. He felt a strange thing. Tom, the casual, easy Tom, was uneasy. He was fretted by some sharp discomfort. His eyes wandered, his feet tapped, he lighted a cigarette and threw it away. Fennido talked again. A great talker. Tom gathered the sharp points of his nerves together: he was once more composed but with a tension that had in it the power of some prefatory move: almost a charge. In the ensuing scatter of minds, Tom was busy gathering them together, gathering them to him. Ill-at-ease no longer. He was speaking.... He spoke for a while, wreathed in the comfortable silence of the others. David’s eyes, moved by an impulse he was not conscious of, wandered. They met the eyes of Marcia Duffield. He looked away, shocked by a current which had flowed momently between them. David knew Tom’s words held him unpleasantly; at times held him not at all. What was the interest in them, what their motive, beyond Tom’s wish to speak and to hold interest? David sensed this: sensed the rebuke he felt in this for Tom. As his eyes went back to the eyes of Marcia Duffield it came to him that she was feeling similar things with him. In the brief meeting of their eyes, it was as if they had discovered one another in themselves. This was absurd and impossible! Marcia Duffield? David’s mind could not grasp this flashing intuition; it slipped leaving no conscious mark. He looked harder at the others in the unwitting need not to look again at her. Already, what he could carry with him of that strange momentary kinship across the room was reduced to the sense of bright, black, hard eyes, filled with a wistful question.