"Well," he said, "it's so jolly risky. These things, you know, only end one way." Fanny's eyes said plainly that to _their_ vision all sorts of ways were possible. "If it were any other man but----" He stopped short at Furnival's name. Fanny lowered her eyes almost as if she had been convicted of indiscretion. "You see," she said, "any other man wouldn't do. He's the one and only man. There never was any other. That's the awful part of it for her." "Then why on earth did she marry the other fellow?" "Because Furny couldn't marry her. And he wouldn't, either. That's not his way." "I know it's not his way. And if Viveash took steps, what then?" "Then perhaps--he'd have to." "Good Lord----" "Oh, it isn't a deep-laid plan." "I never said it was." He didn't think it. Marriages had been made at Amberley, and divorces, too; not by any plan of Fanny's, but by the risks she took. Seeing the dangerous way she mixed things, he didn't, he couldn't suspect her of a plan, but he did suspect her of an unholy joy in the prospect of possible explosions. "Of course," she said, reverting to her vision, "of course he'd have to." She looked at Straker with eyes where mischief danced a fling. It was clear that in that moment she saw Laurence Furnival the profane, Furnival the scorner of marriage, caught and tied: punished (she scented in ecstasy the delicate irony of it), so beautifully punished there where he had sinned. Straker began to have some idea of the amusement Fanny got out of her house parties. For a moment they had no more to say. All around them there was silence, born of Mrs. Viveash and her brooding, of young Reggy's trouble with Miss Probyn, and of some queer triangular complication in the converse of Brocklebank, Lady Paignton, and Mr. Higginson. In that moment and that pause Straker thought again of Miss Tarrant. It was, he said to himself, the pause and the moment for her appearance. And (so right was he in his calculation) she appeared. II He saw her standing in the great doorway of the east wing where the three steps led down on to the terrace. She stood on the topmost step, poised for her descent, shaking her scarf loose to drift in a white mist about her. Then she came down the terrace very slowly, and the measured sweep of her limbs suggested that all her movements would be accomplished to a large rhythm and with a superb delay.