Smitten suddenly when she stood still to face her question, by a sense of the silence of the room, she recognised that they were not waiting at all for her to make a party there. They wanted to go on with their talk. They had not merely been sitting there in council at the heart of the gloom because the arrival of new boarders was beginning to lift it. They had sat like that many times before. They were grouped together between her and her old standing in the house, and not only they, but life, going, at this moment, on and on. They did not know, life did not know, what she was going to prove. They did not know why she had come down. She could not go back again without driving home her proof. It was here the remainder of the evening must be passed, standing on guard before its earlier part, strung by it to an animation that would satisfy Mrs. Bailey and restore to herself the place she had held in the house at the time when her life there had not been a shapeless going on and on. The shapelessness had gone on too long. Mrs. Bailey had been aware of it, even in her estrangement. But she could be made to feel that she had been mistaken. Looked back upon now, the interval showed bright with things that would appear to Mrs. Bailey as right and wonderful life; they were wonderful now, linked up with the wonder of this evening, and could be discussed with her, now that it was again miraculously certain they were not all there was. But Mr. Gunner was still there, perched stolidly in the way. In the old days antagonism and some hidden fear there was in his dislike of her, would have served to drive him away. But now he was immovable; and felt, or for some reason thought he felt, no antagonism. Perhaps he and Mrs. Bailey had discussed her together. In this intolerable thought she moved towards the sofa with the desperate intention of sitting intimately down at Mrs. Bailey’s side and beginning somehow, no matter how, to talk in a way that must in the end send him away. “There’s a new comet,” she said violently. They looked up simultaneously into her face, each of their faces wearing a kind, veiled, unanimous patience. Mrs. Bailey held her smile and seemed about to speak; but she sat back resuming her dreamy composure as Mr. Gunner taking out his notebook cheerfully said: “If you’ll give me his name and address we’ll take the earliest opportunity of paying a call.” Mrs. Bailey was pleading for indulgence of her failure to cover and distribute this jest in her usual way. But she was ready now for a seated confabulation. But he would stay, permitted by her, immovable, slashing across their talk with his unfailing snigger, unreproved. “All sorts of people are staying up to see it; I suppose one ought,” Miriam said cheerfully. She could go upstairs and think about the comet. She went away, smiling back her response to Mrs. Bailey’s awakening smile.