Mrs. Bullivant, as she murmured what she could in reply to this ceaseless flow of sympathy from the retired officers and their wives and daughters, and the cathedral dignitaries and their wives and daughters, and the wives and daughters of the county who came without their men because their men wouldn't come, felt vaguely but deeply that it was somehow wrong that Ingeborg should both sin and be sympathised with. She had no right, her injured mother felt, to look so small and stricken. Her family had quite properly removed her outside the pale of their affection till she should announce her broken-off engagement to that dreadful German and ask to be forgiven for ever having been engaged at all, but she ought not to look like somebody who is outside a pale. She seemed positively to be advertising the pale. It was bad taste. It was really the worst of taste when you were the sinner to look like the sinned against; to look ill-used; to droop openly. Yet never could a girl who had done such horrible, such detestably deceitful and vulgar things, have been treated so gently by her family. It had been, Mrs. Bullivant felt, the only good thing in a wretched affair, the perfect breeding with which the Bullivants had met the situation. Not one of them had even remotely alluded to the scene she had made the first afternoon. No one had questioned her, no one had troubled her in any way. She had been left quite free, and no one had exacted the smallest sacrifice of her time to any of their needs. Her father had given her a complete holiday, not allowing her at all in his study, and whenever she had attempted to do anything for her mother or in the house Richards had been rung for. Judith, dear child, seemed instinctively to do the right thing, and without a word from her mother avoided Ingeborg; she was so delicate about it, so fine in her feeling that here was something not quite nice, that she turned red each time Ingeborg during the first day or two tried to talk to her, and quietly went into another room. All the last part of the week Ingeborg had spent in the garden, quite free, quite undisturbed, not a claim on her. And yet here she was, standing about at the party or sitting alone in foolish corners, thin, and pale, and unsmiling, like a reproach. Through a gap in the crowd Mrs. Bullivant presently saw her being talked to by one who had once been a general but now in retirement wreaked his disciplines on bees. She just had time to notice how her daughter started and flushed when this man suddenly addressed her--such bad manners to start and flush--before the crowd closed again. She shut her eyes for a moment and felt very helpless. Who knew to what lengths Ingeborg's bad manners might not go, and what she might not be saying to the man?