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Mr. Gryce’s only occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not too hard a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such low diet. At any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of the situation that she yielded to a sense of security in which all fear of Mr. Rosedale, and of the difficulties on which that fear was contingent, vanished beyond the edge of thought.
    The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted her from these thoughts had she not caught a sudden look of distress in her companion’s eye. His seat faced toward the door, and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an acquaintance, a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and general sense of commotion which her own entrance into a railway-carriage was apt to produce.
    She knew the symptoms at once and was not surprised to be hailed by the high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering under a load of bags and dressing-cases.
    â€œOh, Lily—are you going to Bellomont? Then you can’t let me have your seat, I suppose? But I must have a seat in this carriage—porter, you must find me a place at once. Can’t some one be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends. Oh, how do you do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make him understand that I must have a seat next to you and Lily.”
    Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller with a carpet-bag who was doing his best to make room for her by getting out of the train, stood in the middle of the aisle diffusing about her that general sense of exasperation which a pretty woman on her travels not infrequently creates.
    She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run through a ring like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small, pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her self-assertive tone and gestures, so that, as one of her friends observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great deal of room.
    Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart’s was at her disposal, she possessed herself of it with a farther displacement of her surroundings, explaining meanwhile that she had come across from Mount Kisco in her motor-car that morning and had been kicking her heels for an hour at Garrisons without even the alleviation of a cigarette, her brute of a husband having neglected to replenish her case before they parted that morning.
    â€œAnd at this hour of the day I don’t suppose you’ve a single one left, have you, Lily?” she plaintively concluded.
    Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own lips were never defiled by tobacco.
    â€œWhat an absurd question, Bertha!” she exclaimed, blushing at the thought of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden’s.
    â€œWhy, don’t you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What—you never—And you don’t either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course—how stupid of me—I understand.”
    And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a smile which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her own.

III
    B ridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours, and when Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own good.
    Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the tray of tall glasses and silver-collared decanters which the butler had just placed on a low table near the fire.
    The hall was arcaded, with a gallery supported on columns of pale yellow marble. Tall clumps of flowering plants were grouped against a background of dark foliage in the angles of