Wantley bit his lip. What sort of day would he, Lady Wantley, and Downing, spend together? He felt angry with his cousin for having exposed them to such an ordeal. Then the elder Miss Wake asked him some insignificant question concerning the journey which lay before her, and he began speaking, going on, as it seemed to himself, aimlessly and endlessly, hardly waiting for the old lady's vague, nervous answers, while intensely, agonizingly, conscious of Cecily's quiet figure opposite, of her pale face and stricken eyes. At last the meal which had seemed to him so interminably long came to an end, and they all went into the hall, where Lady Wantley was walking slowly up and down, waiting to bid farewell to her kinswomen, and looking, as the young man saw with a certain resentment, quite unconscious of the storms which had passed over the little company of people now gathered about her. As Mrs. Robinson placed herself in the carriage, by the side of her old cousin, she turned to Wantley, and said deliberately, as if giving challenge: 'Sir George Downing will lunch in the Beach Room. He leaves to-night, and of course I shall be back before he starts.' Wantley made no answer. He was engaged in drawing the rug across Cecily's knees; as he did so he felt her hand quiver a moment under his, and there came over him an eager impulse to go with her, to comfort her--above all, to shut himself off with her from all this tragic business, which apparently neither he nor she could affect or modify. Penelope again spoke. 'You, Ludovic, will of course lunch with mamma?' He answered: 'Yes, of course, of course!' Looking straight at his cousin, he could not help adding: 'No one shall disturb Sir George Downing till your return.' And then--not till then--a wave of colour reddened Penelope's oval face from brow to chin. II And so they had gone, and Wantley, turning away, back into the hall, felt a great depression--a feeling of utter weariness--come upon him. It was with an unreasonable and unreasoning irritation that he saw Lady Wantley walking slowly, with her peculiar leisurely grace of movement, into the great Picture Room, there to take up her accustomed position by the ivory inlaid table on which lay her books and blotting-pad. 'People when they reach that age,' he said to himself, 'have their emotions, their feelings of love and pride, mercifully deadened.' But, all the same, fearing what she might say to him, he did not follow her, but instead, slipping his hands into his pockets, and pushing his straw hat down over his eyes, made his way out of doors.