"I half promised Vera to meet her marvellous new palmist, Madame Zero, at her house this afternoon." She took Vera's note out of a long grey envelope sealed with an Egyptian seal. "It seems she's _too_ wonderful. Only one or two people are going." "Mrs. Ogilvie kindly asked me," said Bertie modestly. "Of course you'll go and hear what the soothsayer has to say about the velvet case?" "Perhaps, but I'm not sure.... I feel restless.... I must say, it does seem unlikely there could be much harm in a woman who has her portrait painted in porcelain from a photograph--by the young lady at the photographer's, I dare say, who makes the appointments and touches up the negatives. And yet--perhaps that very innocence--that sweet, blank expression--even the tight sleeves and the two boys may make her all the more attractive!" Wilton got up. "Good-bye," he said. "You're perverse. It's no use, I see, telling you not to worry; but please try to realise there's no occasion." "Wouldn't you say just the same if you thought there had been occasion?" she persisted. "Absolutely. But that doesn't prove I'm not sincere now." He pressed her hand with a look that he hoped conveyed the highest respect, the tenderest sympathy, a deep, though carefully suppressed passion, and a longing to administer some refined and courteous consolation, and went away. Wilton was only twenty-five, so, naturally, as soon as he got home, he tried the expression in the mirror, and was horribly disappointed in it. "I must have looked as if I'd suddenly got an awful twinge of neuralgia," he said to himself. "It shows how careful one ought to be. Confound it!" * * * * * Felicity, however, was not troubling herself about Wilton or his expressive looks. The complicated glance, which he feared was a failure, had not even been seen by her. What he had said cheered her for the moment, and _au fond_, at the back of her brain, with her real sound common sense, she did not actually believe in the cause of her grief. But passion and jealousy, unfortunately, are not governed by sound common sense; they work in circles. Argument and reasoning have but a temporary effect on them; they come back to the point at which they started.