might have been meant to reach his ear: "I wish you all the
luck that we can spare!"

About the dinner-table, which Effie, with Miss Viner's aid,
had lavishly garlanded, the little party had an air of
somewhat self-conscious festivity. In spite of flowers,
champagne and a unanimous attempt at ease, there were
frequent lapses in the talk, and moments of nervous groping
for new subjects. Miss Painter alone seemed not only
unaffected by the general perturbation but as tightly sealed
up in her unconsciousness of it as a diver in his bell. To
Darrow's strained attention even Owen's gusts of gaiety
seemed to betray an inward sense of insecurity. After
dinner, however, at the piano, he broke into a mood of
extravagant hilarity and flooded the room with the splash
and ripple of his music.

Darrow, sunk in a sofa corner in the lee of Miss Painter's
granite bulk, smoked and listened in silence, his eyes
moving from one figure to another. Madame de Chantelle, in
her armchair near the fire, clasped her little granddaughter
to her with the gesture of a drawing-room Niobe, and Anna,
seated near them, had fallen into one of the attitudes of
vivid calm which seemed to Darrow to express her inmost
quality. Sophy Viner, after moving uncertainly about the
room, had placed herself beyond Mrs. Leath, in a chair near
the piano, where she sat with head thrown back and eyes
attached to the musician, in the same rapt fixity of
attention with which she had followed the players at the
Francais. The accident of her having fallen into the same