added: "About her husband." "Oh yes, but there are some new ones." "None for me. Oh, novelty would be pleasant!" "Doesn't it appear that of late he has been particularly horrid?" "His fluctuations don't matter," I replied; "they are all covered by the single circumstance I mentioned the evening we waited for him together. What will you have? He has no dignity." Miss Anvoy, who had been introducing with her American distinctness, looked encouragingly round at some of the combinations she had risked. "It's too bad I can't see him." "You mean Gravener won't let you?" "I haven't asked him. He lets me do everything." "But you know he knows him and wonders what some of us see in him." "We haven't happened to talk of him," the girl said. "Get him to take you some day out to see the Mulvilles." "I thought Mr. Saltram had thrown the Mulvilles over." "Utterly. But that won't prevent his being planted there again, to bloom like a rose, within a month or two." Miss Anvoy thought a moment. Then, "I should like to see them," she said with her fostering smile. "They're tremendously worth it. You mustn't miss them." "I'll make George take me," she went on as Mrs. Saltram came up to interrupt us. The girl smiled at her as kindly as she had smiled at me, and addressing the question to her, continued: "But the chance of a lecture--one of the wonderful lectures? Isn't there another course announced!" "Another? There are about thirty!" I exclaimed, turning away and feeling Mrs. Saltram's little eyes in my back. A few days after this, I heard that Gravener's marriage was near at hand--was settled far Whitsuntide; but as I had received no invitation I doubted it, and presently there came to me in fact the report of a postponement. Something was the matter; what was the matter was supposed to be that Lady Coxon was now critically ill. I had called on her after my dinner in the Regent's Park, but I had neither seen her nor seen Miss Anvoy. I forget to-day the exact order in which, at this period, certain incidents occurred and the particular stage at which it suddenly struck me, making me catch my breath a little, that the progression, the acceleration was for all the world that of a drama. This was probably rather late in the day, and the exact order doesn't matter. What had already occurred was some accident determining a more patient wait. George Gravener, whom I met again, in fact told me as much, but without signs of perturbation. Lady Coxon had to be constantly attended to, and there were other good reasons as well. Lady Coxon had to be so constantly attended to that on the occasion of a second attempt in the Regent's Park I equally failed to obtain a sight of her niece. I judged it discreet under the circumstances not to make a third; but this didn't matter, for it was through Adelaide Mulville that the side-wind of the comedy, though I was at first unwitting, began to reach me. I went to Wimbledon at times because Saltram was