When she appeared among the guests again she was pale, her lips were set,
and she held her head high. Her mother said the dear child was quite
overwrought, but she saw only what she expected to see through her own
tear-bedimmed eyes, and other people were differently impressed. They
thought Evadne was cold and preoccupied when it came to the parting, and
did not seem to feel leaving her friends at all. She went out dry-eyed
after kissing her mother, took her seat in the carriage, bowed polite but
unsmiling acknowledgments to her friends, and drove off with Major
Colquhoun with as little show of emotion, and much the same air as if she
had merely been going somewhere on business, and expected to return
directly.

"Thank goodness, all that is over!" Major Colquhoun exclaimed. She looked
at him coolly and critically.

He was sitting with his hat In his hand, and she noticed that his hair was
thin on his forehead, and there was nothing of youth in his eyes.

"I expect you are tired," he further observed.

"No, I am not tired, thank you," Evadne answered.

Then she set her lips once more, leant back, and looked out of the
carriage window at the street all sloppy with mud, and the poor people
seeming so miserable in the rain which had been falling steadily for the
last hour.

"Poor weary creatures!" she thought. "We have so much, and they so
little!" But she did not speak again till the carriage pulled up at the
station, when she leant forward with anxious eyes, and said something