“You’ll have to let your friends settle whether they want to be taken or not, Eddy.... Dear, kind, absurd boy, that’s been so good to me, I’m going now. Goodbye, and get well.” Her fingers lightly touched his forehead, and she left him; left him alone in a world become poor and thin and ordinary, shorn of some beauty, of certain dreams and laughter and surprises. Into it came his mother. “Is Mrs. Le Moine gone, then, dear?” “Yes,” he said. “She is gone.” So flatly he spoke, so apathetically, that she looked at him in anxiety. “She has tired you. You have been talking too much. Really, this mustn’t happen again....” He moved restlessly over on to his side. “It won’t happen again, mother. Never again.” CHAPTER XVII. CONVERSION. On Midsummer Eve, which was the day before his marriage, Eddy had a number of his friends to dinner at the Moulin d’Or. It had amused him to ask a great many, and to select them from many different quarters and sets, and to watch how they all got on together. For many of them were not in the habit of meeting one another. The Vicar of St. Gregory’s, for instance, did not, in the normal course of his days, as a rule come across Billy Raymond, or Cecil Le Moine, with whom he was conversing courteously across the table; Bob Traherne, his curate, seldom chatted affably with Conservative young members of Parliament such as Nevill Bellairs; Mrs. Crawford had long since irrevocably decided against social intercourse with Eileen Le Moine, to whom she was talking this evening as if she was rather pleased to have the opportunity; Bridget Hogan was wont to avoid militant desirers of votes, but to-night she was garrulously holding forth to a lady novelist of these habits who resided in a garden city; Eddy’s friend, the young Irish Unionist, was confronted and probably outraged by Blake Connolly, Eileen’s father, the Nationalist editor of the _Hibernian_, a vehement-tongued, hot-tempered, rather witty person, with deep blue eyes like Eileen’s, and a flexible, persuasive voice. At the same table with Bob Traherne and Jane Dawn was a beautiful young man in a soft frilly shirt, an evangelical young man who at Cambridge had belonged to the C.I.C.C.U., and had preached in the Market Place. If he had known enough about them, he would have thought Jane Dawn’s attitude towards religion and life a pity, and Bob Traherne’s a bad mistake. But on this harmonious occasion they all met as friends. Even James Peters, sturdy and truthful, forbore to show Cecil Le Moine that he did not like him. Even Hillier, though it was pain and grief to him, kept silence from good words, and did not denounce Eileen Le Moine.