“Lady Anne? Oh, she lives at Staple now. Didn’t you know?” The speaker’s voice was clear and resonant, with the peculiar carrying quality which has replaced in the modern Englishwoman of the upper classes that excellent thing in woman which was the proud boast of an earlier generation. The conjunction of the familiar words “Lady Anne” and “Staple” struck sharply on Jean’s ears, and almost instinctively she looked up. As she stirred, one of the women glanced indifferently in her direction, then placidly resumed her conversation with her companion. “It was just after the smash-up,” she pursued glibly. “Blaise Tormarin rushed off abroad for a time, and the news of Nesta’s death came while he was away. Poor Lady Anne had to write and tell him of it.” “Rather ghastly!” commented the other woman. “I never heard the whole story of the affair. I was in Paris, then, and it was all over--barring the general gossip, of course!--by the time I returned. I tried to pump it out of Lady Anne once, but she was as close as an oyster.” Both women talked without lowering their voices in the slightest degree, and with that complete indifference to the proximity of a stranger sometimes exhibited by a certain arrogant type. Jean, realising that it was her father’s friends who were under discussion, and finding herself forced into the position of an unwilling auditor, felt wretchedly uncomfortable. She wished fervently that she could in some way arrest the conversation. Yet it was clearly as impossible for her to lean forward and say: “You are talking about the people I am on my way to visit,” as it would have been for her to put her fingers in her ears. So far nothing had been said to which she could actually object. Her feeling was chiefly the offspring of a supersensitive fear that she might learn from the lips of these two gossiping women, one of whom was apparently intimately acquainted with the private history of the Tormarin family, some little fact or detail which Lady Anne might not care for her future guest to know. Apart from this fear, it would hardly have been compatible with human nature--certainly not feminine human nature--if she had not felt pricked to considerable personal interest in the topic under discussion.