"Indeed! I didn't know you had been away until to-night."
"I felt that I must have rest—change—time to think and to recover."
"From what, Mr. Rodney?"
"From the blow; the blow dealt me by a cherished hand."
Mrs. Verulam tried not to look too obviously bored.
"I hope you are better?"
"That I have to find out; that I must know. It is a question to me whether I shall ever be better."
He glanced again at the radiant Huskinson, now in animated conversation with Lady Pearl and the Duchess, thought again of James Bush, and was nearly feeling himself the most unhappy of men. He could not hide from himself the horrible fact that Huskinson looked well in evening-dress, and the man who looks well in evening-dress looks well in anything. Mr. Rodney surveyed the slim form of the orange-grower, his curly black hair, his bright and merry dark eyes, noted his animated and youthful manner, perceived that he went to a first-rate tailor—Francis did know all about it!—and felt a sort of prostration stealing over him. He mentally went back upon his resolve to hold out the right hand of fellowship to Huskinson by a present of melons from Mitching Dean. One does not heap melons upon an adversary. Human charity has its limits. Mr. Rodney, casting a pale and jaundiced glance upon the bright and successful youth so lightly bearing his recent trouble, resolved, and resolved with real firmness, that the beds of Mitching Dean should not be denuded of their mellow and tender-hued fruit. No, no!
Meanwhile, Chloe was in high feather. She had lost all fear of discovery, and gave herself ardently to the bosom of that wonderful thing society, which received her with that strange and bizarre passion of receptive protection and coaxing ecstasy reserved for the millionaire. Only the millionaire fully knows the greedy love of the monster, its tenacious anxiety to please, its skipping and self-conscious lures, its readiness for self-humiliation, its grand and ample abandonments of dignity. Only the millionaire sees in perfection those fawning attitudes of the monster, supple and engaging, which no new-fledged puppy dog can ever surpass, or even emulate, when creeping with flattened ears about the feet of a worshipped master. Chloe knew at last the smiles of Duchesses as she could never have known them, had she not slipped into an evening coat, pumps, silk socks, and "the newest thing in waistcoats." The lethargy of a forgetful footman had opened for her the very gates of heaven. She had the animal spirits to enter in with an intrepid gladness. At present she was cheering up the melancholies of the Lady Pearl, who blossomed into a sort of sepulchral hilarity beneath her warming rays. The Duchess of Southborough smiled upon the sunny transformation. But soon her Grace, business-like even in beatitude, remembered that there were even more important matters afoot than the gradual dispersion of a daughter's gout, and, advancing upon Mrs. Verulam, she exclaimed in her friendly bass: