blunder he had nothing but commendation. It was as becoming to the
spirited grace of its wearer as a royal mantle to a queen. Carrying it
as she did, with an easy, preoccupied affability that enabled her to
look round him and over him and through him, to greet him and converse
with him, without seeming positively to take in the fact of his
existence, he was permitted to suppose the incident of their previous
acquaintance, once so vital to himself, to have been forgotten. If this
were so, it would be nothing very strange, since a woman of
twenty-seven, who has had much social experience, may be permitted to
lose sight of the more negligible of the conquests she has made as a
girl of eighteen. She had asked him to dinner, and placed him honorably
at her right; but words could not have made it plainer than it was that
he was but an accident to the occasion.

He was there, in short, because he was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Temple.
After a two years' absence from New England he had arrived in Waverton
that day, "Oh, bother! bring him along," had been the formula in which
Miss Guion had conveyed his invitation, the dinner being but an
informal, neighborly affair. Two or three wedding gifts having arrived
from various quarters of the world, it was natural that Miss Guion
should want to show them confidentially to her dear friend and distant
relative, Drusilla Fane. Mrs. Fane had every right to this privileged
inspection, since she had not only timed her yearly visit to her
parents, Mr. and Mrs. Temple, so that it should synchronize with the
wedding, but had introduced Olivia to Colonel Ashley, in the first
place. Indeed, there had been a rumor at Southsea, right up to the time
of Miss Guion's visit to the pretty little house on the Marine Parade,
that the colonel's calls and attentions there had been not unconnected
with Mrs. Fane herself; but rumor in British naval and military stations
is notoriously overactive, especially in matters of the heart. Certain