his hand for it, but it stayed suspended--and, for an instant, it seemed as if the whole table waited expectant. Had Buller's camera caught the clear face of Farrell Wand, or only a dim figure? Flora wondered if that was the question Harry wanted to ask. He wanted--and yet he hesitated, as if he did not quite dare touch it. He laughed and filled the glasses. He had dropped his question, and there was no one at the table who seemed ready to put another.

And yet there were questions there, in all the eyes; but some impassable barrier seemed to have come between these eager people, and what, for incalculable reasons, they so much wanted to know. It was not the genial indifference with which Buller had dropped the subject for the approaching bottle. It seemed rather their own timidity that withheld them from touching this subject which at every turn produced upon some one of the eager three some fresh startling effect the others could not understand. They were restless; Clara notably, even under her calm.

Flora knew she was not giving up the quest of Farrell Wand, but only setting it aside with her unfailing thrift, which saved everything. But why, in this case? And Harry, who had been so merry with the mystery at dinner--why had he suddenly tried to suppress her, to want to ignore the whole business; why had he hesitated over his question, and finally let it fall? And why, above all, was Kerr so brilliantly talking at Ella, in the same way he had begun at Flora herself? Talking at Ella as if he hardly saw her, but like some magician flinging out a brilliant train of pyrotechnics to hypnotize the senses, before he proceeds with his trick. And the way Ella was looking at him--her bewildered alacrity, the way she was struggling with what was being so rapidly shot at her--appeared to Flora the prototype of her own struggle to understand what reality these appearances around her could possibly shadow. Never before had her sense of standing on the outside edge of life been so strong. It seemed as though there were some large, impalpable thing growing in the midst of them, around the edges of which they were tiptoeing, daringly, fearfully, each one for himself. But though it loomed so large that she felt herself in the very shadow of it, rub her eyes as she would, she couldn't see it.

Often enough in the crowds she moved among she had felt herself lonely and not wondered at it. But now and here, sitting among her close, intimate circle, her friends and her lover, it seemed like a horrible obsession--yet it was true. As clear as if it had been shown her in a revelation she saw herself absolutely alone.

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