"They have been having tea by themselves, those two," Mary remarked.

"No," said Rush, "not what you could call tea."

Paula smiled vaguely but didn't throw the ball back, did not happen, it
appeared, to care to talk about anything. Presently the chatter among the
rest of them renewed itself.

Only it would have amused an invisible spectator to note how those three
Wollastons, blonde, dolichocephalic, high-strung, magnetically
susceptible, responded, as strips of gold-leaf to the static electricity
about a well rubbed amber rod, to the influence that emanated from that
silent figure on the sofa. Rush, in and out of his chair a dozen times,
to flip the ash from his cigarette, to light one for Mary, to hand the
strawberries round again, was tugging at his moorings like a captive
balloon. When he answered a question it was with the air of interrupting
an inaudible tune he was whistling. John still planted before the
fireplace, taking, automatically, a small part in the talk just as he
went through the minimum of business with his tea, seemed capable of only
one significant action, which he repeated at short, irregular intervals.
He turned his head enough to enable him to see into a mirror which gave
him a reflection of his wife's face; then turned away again, like one
waiting for some sort of reassurance and not getting it. Mary, muscularly
relaxed, indeed, drooping over the tea-table, had visible about her,
nevertheless, a sort of supernormal alertness. Every time her father
looked into the mirror she glanced at him, and she rippled, like still
water, at all of her brother's sudden movements.

As for Wallace Hood, one look at him sitting there, as unresponsive to
the spell as the cup from which he was sipping its third replenishment of