‘The talk will not be too much,’ said Laurie; but as he followed the padrona out of the room he plucked the rose out of his button-hole and crushed it up in his hand and let it drop on the floor. A rose in a man’s coat is perhaps not quite consistent with the deepest phase of recent grief. But he was no deceiver in spite of this little bit of involuntary humbug. Other thoughts had driven his grief away, and diminished its force perhaps; but those were true and natural tears he had been shedding, and he felt ashamed of himself for having been able to think of the rose, and did not want the padrona’s quick eye to light upon that gentlest inconsistency; but on the whole it did not appear to him that he was unequal to their talk. So he went and played with the children while Mrs. Severn withdrew to change her dress for the evening, seating himself in the inner room where the lamp was burning and the table arrayed for tea, while Alice in the dim grey drawing-room, with the folding-doors open, played softest Lieder, such as her soul loved, in the dusk; and Miss Hadley sat and knitted, casting now and then a keen look from under her deep brows at Laurie in his mourning; and the urn bubbled and steamed, and little Edith climbed up into her high seat by the table, waiting till the padrona in her lace collar should come down to tea. CHAPTER XVIII. THE TEA-TABLE. Mrs. Severn’s society was of a peculiar kind,--it had something of the ease of French society, with the homeliness of the true Briton. Very rarely, indeed, did she make calls. She never gave parties of any description whatever; and yet there was always a little flow and current of human minds and faces about her. The class which in London is perhaps more at liberty to please itself than any other class,--at least in England,--was that to which she belonged, both in right of her husband and of herself, and which circulated about her, very independent of rule, and very full of life. I do not know if I should call it the artist-class, for that is a wide world, and has many divisions, and fine people abound in that as in every other division of society. The padrona’s friends were painters, authors, journalists, people with crotchets, public reformers, persons of every kind to whom intellect, as they called it, clearness and brightness, and talk, and the absence of ceremony, were sweeter than any other conditions of society. They came to her studio, some of them, with only a knock at the door,--but these were intimates,--and chatted while she went on with her work. They dropped in in the evening, and chatted again sometimes till midnight; they filled the rooms with discussion of everything in earth and heaven,--art news, political news, society news, a little of everything; they held hot discussions on social questions with the zeal of people immediately concerned, not with the languor of good society. The padrona ‘received’ almost every evening in this way after her work was done; and