as to be a negligible quantity in such housekeeping as they maintained--a
poverty of _dot_ which had been the chief reason why her noble kinsfolk
had consented to her marriage with an American. Looking round the
splendid house, Mrs. Eveleth was aware that her husband could never
have lived in it, still less have built it; while she wondered more than
ever how George, who led the life of a Parisian man of fashion, could
have found the means of doing both.

Not that her anxiety centred on material things; they were too remote
from the general activities of her thought for that. She distilled her
fear out of the living atmosphere around her. She was no novice in this
brilliant, dissolute society, or in the meanings hidden behind its
apparently trivial concerns. Hints that would have had slight
significance for one less expert she found luminous with suggestion; and
she read by signs as faint as those in which the redskin detects the
passage of his foe across the grass. The odd smile with which Diane went
out! The dull silence in which George came home! The manufactured
conversation! The forced gayety! The startling pause! The effort to
begin again, and keep the tone to one of common intercourse! The long
defile of guests! The strangers who came, grew intimate, and
disappeared! The glances that followed Diane when she crossed a room!
The shrug, the whisper, the suggestive grimace, at the mention of her
name! All these were as an alphabet in which Mrs. Eveleth, grown skilful
by long years of observation, read what had become not less familiar
than her mother-tongue.

The fact that her misgivings were not new made it the more difficult to
understand why they had focussed themselves to-night into this great
fear. There had been nothing unusual about the day, except that she had
seen little of Diane, while George had remained shut up in his room,