wondering what their relation to each other could be, and whether they were engaged to be married. Somebody called the lady in white “Mrs. Crosby.” Then somebody else called her “Lady Fan”—which was very confusing. “Brook” never called her anything. Clare saw him fill his glass and look at Lady Fan very hard before he drank, and then Lady Fan did the same thing. Nevertheless they seemed to be perpetually quarrelling over little things. When Brook was tired of being bullied, he calmly ignored his companion, turned from her, and talked in a low tone to a dark woman who had been a beauty and was the most thoroughly well-dressed of the extremely well-dressed party. Lady Fan bit her lip for a moment, and then said something at which all the others laughed—except Brook and the advanced beauty, who continued to talk in undertones.

  To Clare’s mind there was about them all, except Brook, a little dash of something which was not “quite, quite,” as the world would have expressed it. In her opinion Lady Fan was distinctly disagreeable, whoever she might be—as distinctly so as Brook was the contrary. And somehow the girl could not help resenting the woman’s way of treating him. It offended her oddly and jarred upon her good taste, as something to which she was not at all accustomed in her surroundings. Lady Fan was very exquisite in her outward ways, and her speech was of the proper smartness. Yet everything she did and said was intensely unpleasant to Clare.

The Bowrings and the regular guests finished their dinner before the yachting party, and rose almost in a body, with a clattering of their light chairs on the tiled floor. Only the English old maids kept their places a little longer than the rest, and took some more filberts and half a glass of white wine, each. They could not keep their eyes from the party at the other end of the table, and their faces grew a little redder as they sat there. Clare and her mother had to go round the long table to get out, being the last on their side, and they were also the last to reach the door. Again the young girl felt that strong desire to turn her head and look back at Brook and Lady Fan. She noticed it this time, as something she had never felt until that afternoon, but she would not yield to it. She walked on, looking straight at the back of her mother’s head. Then she heard quick footsteps on the tiles behind her, and Brook’s voice.

“I beg your pardon,” he was saying, “you have dropped your shawl.”

She turned quickly, and met his eyes as he stopped close to her, holding out the white chudder which had slipped to the floor 

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