"Apart from the blindness--poor fellow!--is there anything about this young man to object to? There's nothing about his family. Why!--his father's Hamilton Torrens, that was George's great friend at Christ Church. And his mother was an Abercrombie...." "I can't go into that now." Her ladyship cuts Adrian's family very short. Consider her memories of bygones! No wonder she became acutely alive to her duties as a hostess. She had created a precedent in this matter, though really her husband scarcely knew anything about her _affaire de coeur_ with Adrian's father thirty years ago. It was not a hanging matter, but she could not object to the young man's family after such a definite attitude towards his father. Here ends the second short colloquy, which was the one that caused the Earl to be so more than usually absent that evening. It had the opposite effect on her ladyship, who felt better after it; braced up again to company-manners after the first one. Gwen, as mentioned before, was dazzling; superb; what is apt to be called a cynosure, owing to something Milton said. Nevertheless, the Shrewd Observer, who happened in this case to be Aunt Constance, noticed that at intervals the young lady let her right-hand neighbour talk, and died away into preoccupation, with a vital undercurrent of rippled lip and thoughtful eye. Another of her shrewd observations was that when the Hon. Percival, referring to Mr. Torrens, still an absentee by choice, said:--"I tried again to persuade him to come down at feeding-time, but it was no go," Gwen came suddenly out of one dream of this sort to say from her end of the table, miles off:--"He really prefers dining by himself, I know," and went in again. It was this that Aunt Constance referred to in conversation with Mr. Pellew, at about half-past ten o'clock in that same shrubbery walk. They had cultivated each other's absence carefully in the drawing-room, and had convinced themselves that neither was necessary to the other. That clause having been carried nem. con., they were entitled to five minutes' chat, without prejudice. Neither remembered, perhaps, the convert to temperance who decided that passing a public-house door _a contre-coeur_ entitled him to half-a-pint. "How did you get on with little Di Accrington?" the lady had said. And the gentleman had answered:--"First-rate. Talked to her about _your_ partner all the time. How did you hit it off with him?" A sympathetic laugh over the response: "Capitally--he talked about _her_, of course!" quite undid the fiction woven with so much pains indoors, and also as it were lighted a little collateral fire they might warm their fingers at, or burn them. However, a parade of their well-worn seniority, their old experience of life, would keep them safe from _that_. Only it wouldn't do to neglect it.