“The last time I did this sort of thing was at my coming-of-age ball,” Barbara murmured. “Which you gave for yourself because no one would give it for you?” “Well, I hated father’s friends; and he hated mine,” she laughed. “Besides, I’d been in so many scrapes that I _had_ to see whether people would continue to know me.” “They all came,” I said. “Except one. That was the time when Jack Waring proposed to me one day and quarrelled with me the next,” she explained lightly. “Why he wanted to marry me when he disapproved of everything I did . . . I invited him specially.” . . . “And he wouldn’t come?” “No. Apparently . . . Eric isn’t coming . . . to-night.” The announcement fell so tranquilly, it was so long since we had mentioned Eric Lane’s name that I doubted for a moment if I had heard her aright. “You . . . invited him?,” I asked. “Yes. Sonia and David were dining with him; and I told David to bring him. You don’t mind? I wanted to be friends. Ah . . .!” The sound was painfully like a sob; but, when I turned, I saw Barbara smiling eagerly as the O’Ranes came—unaccompanied—up the stairs. “Take David where he won’t be trampled on,” she whispered. I was glad of a moment’s respite after the unintended shock which Barbara had given me. Eric had left too deep a mark on her spirit to be quickly forgotten; but I fancied, when her old exuberant joy in life returned, that she was no longer missing him. An hour before, I had been stupefied to realize that Barbara was my wife; now I wondered how much she was my wife. Not all her thoughts were mine; was all her affection? I was checked, by some question from O’Rane, on the verge of a shameful jealousy. “You want to know who’s here?” I looked down on a seething mass of heads. “It would be easier to say who’s not. Generally speaking, any one who was too old or too young for the war; and a sprinkling of people with charmed lives. The summer and winter without the spring, Raymond calls it.” “It was a slaughter and a half!,” O’Rane muttered. “If you calculate, among your own friends, the families who’ve been left without a direct heir . . .” “Oh, Bertrand will tell you the old aristocracy is done for. I don’t know. It weathered the industrial revolution and the Napoleonic wars.” “The shock was more gradual; there was a greater power of resistance. Now the big estates are breaking up; and the great masses are becoming conscious of their strength.”