"Why are you so sorry for her?"
He hesitated for a moment, and his hesitation meant much to her.
"I don't know. She never says anything, of course. She seems happy enough, but I believe—I believe she's found him out——"
"God help her," Mrs. Wick answered.
The young man remembered this episode as he sat opposite his hostess at dinner an hour and a half later. The dining-room had been re-papered since he had drunk that glass of luke-warm wine in it the day of Hermione's wedding, and his sharp eyes noticed the absence of several ugly things that had been there then. Stags no longer hooted to each other across mountain chasms over the sideboard, and one or two good line drawings hung in their place.
"How do you like it?" Griselda asked him. "Paul and I have been cheering things up a bit."
"Splendid," he replied promptly. "I say, how beautiful your sister is!"
Griselda's rather hard little face softened charmingly as she looked across the table, where the bride was sitting. Hermione Gaskell-Walker was a very handsome young woman in an almost classical way, and her short-sighted, clever-looking husband, who sat nearly opposite her, evidently thought so too, for he peered over the flowers at her in adoration that was plain and pleasing to see.
"They've such a jolly house in Campden Hill. His father was Adrian Gaskell-Walker, the landscape painter, and collected things."
Mr. Wick nodded, but did not answer, for he was busy making a series of those mental photographs, whose keenness and durability so largely contributed to his success in life. He had an amazing power of storing up records of incidents that somehow or other might come in useful to him, and this little dinner party, which he had decided to be a milestone on his road, interested him acutely in its detail.