Glasgow, sitting beside her, caught at that passing flash of her glance that was intended for him specially, and replied to it with an intimacy that startled Slaney. His face was pale, and had the tired look that comes with mental rather than physical fatigue, but the crisp tingle of the champagne had given its inimitable fillip; the excellence of the dinner had brought him into charity with all men--even with his Irish workmen--and the warm luxury and charm of the surroundings had the effect of a perfume whose dizzy fragrance can steep mind and body in repose. The anxieties that he had to bear alone, the reverses that hit him harder than he dared admit, slept in this atmosphere of ease. “Lovely Thais” sat beside him, and the gods had considerately prolonged the absence of her husband. Even Slaney, who might at one time have complicated the situation, now fell into her place in the general sentiment of repose, and made a pleasant background of literary intelligence and perceptiveness. He remembered only as a transient caprice the moment, unforgetable for her, that had given her life its first touch of passion. He finished his glass of burgundy, and took a cigarette from the silver box that his hostess pushed towards him. “We’ll play bézique in the ’bus,” pursued Lady Susan; “we couldn’t possibly talk for six miles. I should go to sleep.” “Oh, heavens, not more cards!” groaned Bunbury. “Do you know, Miss Morris, that she made me play rubicon bézique with her for three hours on end this afternoon. I’d hardly got my boots off when she sent William to hurry me down. I wish she’d teach William to play with her.” “I used to play ‘Spoilt Five’ with the yard boys when I was a child,” said Slaney. “I never aspired to any one as grand as William. We used to play secretly in an old loose box, and the cards were so black that we only knew them by private marks on their backs.” Her eyes were clear and half shy, like a boy’s. Bunbury looked at her delicate, clever hand, and tried to imagine it holding the grimy cards, and wondered how it was that so many impossible things were possible in Ireland. The concert in the Parochial Hall at Letter Kyle was neither more nor less than such entertainments are wont to be. Lady Susan, in her gorgeous _sortie-de-bal_, sat in the front row and carried on a conversation with Mr. Glasgow that, thanks to the vigour of her lungs, was quite unhampered by the efforts of the performers, and was only interrupted when some achievement of Letter Kyle millinery stupefied her into a moment of silence. Slaney was inured to parochial concerts. It was beside her that Glasgow had sat at the last of them, not so many months ago. She remembered how angry Uncle Charles had been because they laughed when the school-master’s wife had tranquilly omitted the top note in “The Lost Chord” as being beyond her compass. To-night she felt as though a wall had been built between her and the founts of laughter.