Mrs. Falconer, who had good-humoredly been amused by his intense Britishness thus far, his pale lack of individuality, his perfect type, now looked sharply at her companion. The rector had been more than right, Mrs. Falconer was used to the indifferent, rather brutal handling by society of human lives. Possibly as she adored people, no one of her set was more interested in the comedies and dramas of her _contemporains_. But there are ways and channels: what runs clear in one runs muddy in another. The rector, in his own way, told her that for several weeks a very beautiful lady had been living at The Dials. She had, it appeared, never been out of the garden gate, and the servants were foreign, all save a deaf old gardener. But the beautiful lady who sought such peculiar seclusion, had a very constant visitor. Of course the rector was not able or sufficiently daring to affirm; with a cleverness worthy a better story he left his hearer to guess, imagine, who the visitor might be. "Don't you think," Mrs. Falconer breathed, after a very short lapse into silence, "that we might let such ghosts alone on Christmas Eve?" She rose and stood before him in her soft, luminous dress; her eyes were intent on him, but in reality she was not looking at him. He had grown so detestable that she could bear his presence no longer; she found herself, however, wanting to learn all his knowledge to its finest detail. She found that she despised herself for any interest she might take. She got rid of him at length, how, she never knew. But she saw him leave her presence with relief. When the miserable man, as she called him, had taken his leave, the deserted guest looked about her rather defiantly, as if the objects with which the room was filled were hostile. Then, with a half-audible exclamation she sank down in a chair, her elbow on the left arm of it, and her chin in her hand. Well, the imputation, the character of what she had just heard vulgarly said and to which, for a bewildered second, she had perhaps vulgarly listened--was highly dreadful, highly disordering to her fashion of thinking and believing about Jimmy Bulstrode! Oh, for a moment she had half believed what that creature said, and her eyes had winked fast at the game before them! In the swiftness of the revolutions it had seemed for a sole flash real; but now that the noise had stopped and the carousel as well, she saw how _wooden_ the horses were and that they were as dead as doornails! If she had been disturbed, she came loyally back now, with a glow and a rush of tenderness as she instantly re-instated what could never lose caste.