'I met in Merrion Square,' and she mentioned a name, 'and do you know
whom he seemed to be very like?' The colour died out of Kilcarney's
cheek and he could but murmur, 'Oh, Violet!' and colouring at being
caught up on what might be looked upon as a mental infidelity, she
answered, 'of course, none is like him . . . I wish you would not seek to
misunderstand me.'

The matter passed off, but next evening she sat looking at her husband,
her thoughts suspended for so long that he began to fear, wrongly
however, that she was about to put forward some accusation, to twit him
perchance on his lack of loyalty to his dead friend. He had not eaten a
banana for dinner, though he had intended to eat one. 'Of course, we
shall never find anyone like him,' she said--'not if we were to search
all the corners of the world. That is so, we're both agreed on that
point, but I've been thinking which of all our friends and acquaintances
would least unworthily fill his place in our lives.' 'Violet! Violet!'
'If you persist in misunderstanding me,' she answered, 'I have no more
to say,' whereupon the Marquis tried to persuade the Marchioness out of
the morose silence that had fallen upon them, and failing to move her he
raised the question that had divided them. 'If you mean, Violet, that
our racing friend would be a poor shift for our dead friend, meaning
thereby that nobody in Dublin is comparable'--'could I have meant
anything else, you old dear?' she replied; and the ice having been
broken, the twain plunged at once into the waters of recollection, and
coming upon a current they were borne onward, swiftly and more swiftly,
till at length a decision had to be come to--they would invite their
racing friend.

It was on the Marquis's lips to say a word or two in disparagement of