“You are very tired,” he said.

“No; wide awake.”

“Don’t you think it best for you to go to bed?”

“No.  But you may go.”

And, as he did not stir:  “I mean that you are not to sit here because I do.”  And she looked around at him.

“What has gone wrong, Eileen?” he said quietly.

He had never before used her given name, and she flushed up.

“There is nothing the matter, Captain Selwyn.  Why do you ask?”

“Yes, there is,” he said.

“There is not, I tell you—­”

“—­And, if it is something you cannot understand,” he continued pleasantly, “perhaps it might be well to ask Nina to explain it to you.”

“There is nothing to explain.”

“—­Because,” he went on, very gently, “one is sometimes led by malicious suggestion to draw false and unpleasant inferences from harmless facts—­”

“Captain Selwyn—­”

“Yes, Eileen.”

But she could not go on; speech and thought itself remained sealed; only a confused consciousness of being hurt remained—­somehow to be remedied by something he might say—­might deny.  Yet how could it help her for him to deny what she herself refused to believe?—­refused through sheer instinct while ignorant of its meaning.

Even if he had done what she heard Rosamund Fane say he had done, it had remained meaningless to her save for the manner of the telling.  But now—­but now!  Why had they laughed—­why had their attitudes and manner and the disconnected phrases in French left her flushed and rigid among the idle group at supper?  Why had they suddenly seemed to remember her presence—­and express their abrupt consciousness of it in such furtive signals and silence?

It was false, anyway—­whatever it meant.  And, anyway, it was false that he had driven away in Mrs. Ruthven’s brougham.  But, oh, if he had only stayed—­if he had only remained!—­this friend of hers who had been so nice to her from the moment he came into her life—­so generous, so considerate, so lovely to her—­and to Gerald!

For a moment the glow remained, then a chill doubt crept in; would he have remained had he known she was to be there? Where did he go after the dinner?  As for what they said, it was absurd.  And yet—­and yet—­

He sat, savagely intent upon the waning fire; she turned restlessly again, elbows close together on her knees, face framed in her hands.

“You ask me if I am tired,” she said.  “I am—­of the froth of life.”

His face changed instantly.  “What?” he exclaimed, laughing.

But she, very young and seriously intent, was now wrestling with the mighty platitudes of youth.  First of all she desired to know what meaning life held for humanity.  Then she expressed a doubt as to the necessity for human happiness; duty being her discovery as sufficient substitute.

But he heard in her childish babble the minor murmur of an undercurrent quickening for the first time; and he listened patiently and answered gravely, touched by her irremediable loneliness.