'Was Evan Cameron.'
'Cameron!' repeated the dry lips of Eveline, who suddenly felt as one in a dreadful dream.
Dead and buried; buried in the sand of the Egyptian desert! Did she hear aright—was this happening to herself or to some one else? She made an effort to speak, but her tongue had lost its power.
'Eveline,' she heard her husband say, 'your wits have gone wool-gathering.'
'I beg your pardon, Sir Paget. What is it?' she asked, faintly.
'Sir! Can't you call me Paget?' said he; and the two guests exchanged glances as much as to say,
'What is up now?'
At that moment the dinner-gong sounded, and giddily and mechanically she took the proffered arm of Sir Harry.
Never while life lasted would Eveline forget the grotesque horror of that little dinner, with the solemn servants in attendance, and all its splendid yet, to her, sickening details and talk, the references to marriages and races—hurdle, steeple, and others—on the tapis, of flirtations and gossip—how terrible, how ghastly they all sounded to her, who felt as if in a mist, out of which their voices seemed to come hollowly, and from a vast distance, and she was compelled to listen with one face—a dead face—coming out of that mist before her!