'All this he had foreseen, and more. It became practically necessary, as he had known all along, for Swansea and Cardiff to put themselves into communication with this system, and as early as June, as we have seen, surveyors were busy on the Molesworth estate over the route. The winter before Mr. Palmer had purchased both it and the adjoining Wyfold estate, knowing that the line of direct communication must pass through one or the other; and when towards the end of July the experts pronounced very strongly in favour of the Molesworth route, he forwarded their recommendation to Amelie, with the request that she would come and talk matters over with him before she left town. The last month had not passed very happily for her; it lacked, at least, that wonderful edge of happiness which May and June had given her. The little rift which had opened between her and Bertie had not closed again, and, if anything, it had become rather wider. She had obeyed his request, and not asked Mrs. Emsworth to lunch, but she had done so unwillingly, rebelling in her mind against this arbitrariness which expected to be obeyed and yet would give no reason for what it wished done. In consequence--for her protest, though mute, was very obvious--the spirit of her compliance was almost as irritating to him as her disobedience would have been. Furthermore, at that interview she had had with him suspicion, vague and darkling, she knew lurked in the shadow of her mind; the piece of him she did not know irresistibly connected itself with Mrs. Emsworth. There it had grown like some mushroom, and, though she did not officially, so to speak, recognise its existence, it was there. Other things, too, had tended to separate them, and in particular the treatment (or so she called it) of her mother by the world of London. She had expected to see and saw that London in general flocked to Mrs. Palmer's new house, where the entertainments, if not quite so wildly improbable as those which awoke the echoes in the glades of Long Island, were on the most lavish and exuberant scale. Consequently London, with its keen eye for the buttered side of the bread, went there in its crowds, drank Mrs. Palmer's champagne, danced to her fiddles, won her money at bridge, and enjoyed the performances of all the most notable singers and pianists in the world with the greatest contentment. But what Amelie saw also was the half-shrugged shoulders, the instantaneous glance of the eye, the raised eyebrow, the just-not-genuine smile of those who were the most constant _habitués_ there. Mrs. Palmer, in fact, was in London, not of London. This Amelie resented, and, by way of retaliation, she had, as was perfectly natural, her mother constantly in her own house, and filled it with Americans perhaps rather more than was perfectly natural. For the rest, there had been nothing the least resembling an open breach between her and Bertie; he accepted the continual presence