So he was brought to a halt, confronting in one of his donated rooms the loveliest of the Huns; confronting, but not looking at her exactly....

“Well, it’s been hot, as you know—­in fact, the hottest summer since the Weather Bureau began.  That wasn’t comfortable, of course.  There was a good deal of suffering, where people couldn’t afford ice....  Personally, I’ve happened to be so busy that the weather didn’t matter—­”

“That’s quite ominous, isn’t it, in a doctor?  Has there been so much sickness in this neighborhood?”

“Yes, there’s been a lot of it.  We had rather a bad typhoid epidemic, beginning in July—­not easy to check in this old district, standing pretty much as it was before the war.  I sometimes think there’s no hope of ever cleaning it out, short of a London fire....  I—­I hope you’ve been well?”

“Oh, yes, quite well, thank you.  But is this district so bad—­from a health point of view?”

“You should see it,” said he, rather drily.  “Or rather, of course, you shouldn’t.  It’s more or less disturbing to one’s peace of mind at times....”

She was looking at him with an interested intentness of which she was quite unconscious.  Never before had she seen this man free of the knowledge of menacing discussion ever pressing in the foreground; so now it was a little as if she met for the first time some one whom she had heard a great deal about from others.  Her eye for externals had observed his new suit at once; in this deceptive light she considered that it looked quite nice, not suspecting that it was only the Prince, reduced; and she was thinking, with a sense of discovery, that Mr. V.V. was undoubtedly a good-looking man.  A certain change in his manner she had also noted; a new touch of force, it seemed, a somewhat stiffened masculinity.  What had become of that rather engaging hopeful look of his, which was the second thing she had ever noticed about him?...

“Perhaps I shall see it some day,” she answered.  “If I ever become one of your Mr. Pond’s district visitors and investigators.”

“Are you thinking of doing that?”

“Oh, I offered to try to do something, but Mr. Pond declined me, without thanks.  He said I was perfectly useless to him—­in his big and serious work.  The worst of it was,” she said, smiling rather ruefully, “he proved it.”

She was glancing toward the door, with the moving and humming groups beyond, and so missed the sudden eagerness that briefly lit his face.

“What part of the work—­if I might ask—­were you—­specially interested in?”

“I suppose I’m not really interested in any part.  That must be the trouble.  Probably it’s just the usual dissatisfied feeling—­when one is a little tired of parties....”

Was that not yet another confidence, clearly calling for an understanding listener, for sympathetic reassurance?  Nothing of the sort came to Cally; nothing of any sort.  The brief pause, sharpened as it was by Mr. V.V.’s oddly formal bearing, was rather like a cold douche.  And now it seemed that she must have been counting on this man somehow all along, though it was not clear as to what....