manner of a governess. To her husband, too, for that matter.

Fyne told her that I was fully informed. Not a muscle of her ruddy
smooth handsome face moved. She had schooled herself into that sort of
thing. Having seen two successive wives of the delicate poet chivied and
worried into their graves, she had adopted that cool, detached manner to
meet her gifted father's outbreaks of selfish temper. It had now become
a second nature. I suppose she was always like that; even in the very
hour of elopement with Fyne. That transaction when one remembered it in
her presence acquired a quaintly marvellous aspect to one's imagination.
But somehow her self-possession matched very well little Fyne's
invariable solemnity.

I was rather sorry for him. Wasn't he worried! The agony of solemnity.
At the same time I was amused. I didn't take a gloomy view of that
"vanishing girl" trick. Somehow I couldn't. But I said nothing. None
of us said anything. We sat about that big round table as if assembled
for a conference and looked at each other in a sort of fatuous
consternation. I would have ended by laughing outright if I had not been
saved from that impropriety by poor Fyne becoming preposterous.

He began with grave anguish to talk of going to the police in the
morning, of printing descriptive bills, of setting people to drag the
ponds for miles around. It was extremely gruesome. I murmured something
about communicating with the young lady's relatives. It seemed to me a
very natural suggestion; but Fyne and his wife exchanged such a
significant glance that I felt as though I had made a tactless remark.

But I really wanted to help poor Fyne; and as I could see that, manlike,
he suffered from the present inability to act, the passive waiting, I