The engagement hadn't leaked out so much as flooded out. It would have continued secret for quite a long time, known only to the three and to the maids--who being young women themselves, and well acquainted with the symptoms of the condition, were sure of it before Miss Entwhistle had even begun to suspect,--if Wemyss hadn't taken to dropping in, contrary to expectations, on the Thursday evenings. Lucy's descriptions of these evenings and of the people who came, and of how very kind they were to her aunt and herself, and how anxious they were to help her, they of course supposing that she was, actually, the lonely thing she would have been if she hadn't had Everard as the dear hidden background to her life--at this point they embraced,--at first amused him, then made him curious, and finally caused him to come and see for himself. He didn't tell Lucy he was coming, he just came. It had taken him five Thursday evenings of playing bridge as usual at his club, playing it with one hand, as he said to her afterwards, and thinking of her with the other--'You know what I mean,' he said, and they laughed and embraced--before it slowly oozed into and pervaded his mind that there was his little girl, rounded by people fussing over her and making love to her (because, said Wemyss, everybody would naturally want to make love to her), and there was he, the only person who had a right to do this, somewhere else. So he walked in; and when he walked in, the group standing round Lucy with their backs to the door saw her face, which had been gently attentive, suddenly flash into colour and light; and turning with one accord to see what it was she was looking at behind them with parted lips and eyes of startled joy, beheld once more the unknown chief mourner of the funeral in Cornwall. Down there they had taken for granted that he was a relation of Jim's, the kind of relative who in a man's life appears only three times, the last of which is his funeral; here in Eaton Terrace they were immediately sure he was not, anyhow, that, because for relatives who only appear those three times a girl's face doesn't change in a flash from gentle politeness to tremulous, shining life. They all stared at him astonished. He was so different from the sorts of people they had met at Jim's. For one thing he was so well dressed,--in the mating season, thought Miss Entwhistle, even birds dress well,--and in his impressive evening clothes, with what seemed a bigger and more spotless shirt-front than any shirt-front they could have imagined, he made them look and feel what they actually were, a dingy, shabby lot.