Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some one else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism. Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling and Una’s tea too sweet, she set down her cup, and looked about for Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every uncertainty. She met them now, but only, as she felt, in transit; they included her parenthetically in a larger flight. She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van Sideren attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment later, had overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl’s side. She bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him to swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of appetite. Julia winced at her own definition of the smile. On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised his wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. “Did I open their eyes a bit? Did I tell them what you wanted me to?” he asked gaily. Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. “What I wanted--?” “Why, haven’t you--all this time?” She caught the honest wonder of his tone. “I somehow fancied you’d rather blamed me for not talking more openly--before-- You’ve made me feel, at times, that I was sacrificing principles to expediency.” She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: “What made you decide not to--any longer?” She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. “Why--the wish to please you!” he answered, almost too simply. “I wish you would not go on, then,” she said abruptly. He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the darkness. “Not go on--?” “Call a hansom, please. I’m tired,” broke from her with a sudden rush of physical weariness. Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been infernally hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had noticed once or twice that she looked pale--she mustn’t come to another Saturday. She felt herself yielding, as she always did, to the warm influence of his concern for her, the feminine in her leaning on the man in him with a conscious intensity of abandonment. He put her in the hansom, and her hand stole into his in the darkness. A tear or two rose, and she let them fall. It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles! That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the subject of his talk. He combined a man’s dislike of uncomfortable questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding them; and she knew that if he returned to the subject he must have some special reason for doing so. “You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did I put the case badly?” “No--you put it very well.”