It was a bright spring day; one of those days on which the freshness and renewal of life which only spring knows, and for the sake of which even the cold monotony of winter is endurable, seem to be in the very air, and to radiate with the light itself. Even in London, where nature’s broadest effects, only, can be felt, there was a sense of exuberance which was almost excitement. The sun shone with a brightness which seemed to shed oblivion over past darkness. The air was quickening and stirring with vague and limitless possibilities.

It is rather a notable arrangement which makes the quickening of life in one of the least natural systems in the world, London society, simultaneous with nature’s great awakening. It presents a suggestion of combined travesty, patronage, and unconscious testimony to that affinity between man and nature which nothing can wholly destroy, which, if worked out with a certain amount of latitude to a fantastic imagination, will have a rather bewildering effect upon the focus of things in general. But it is nevertheless a fact that on this particular day in May very many of the impulses stirring in nature had their strangely distorted counterparts in the impulses of society. Society, like nature, had discarded its winter garments, its winter habits; society, like nature, was restless with fresh beginnings, fresh hopes, fresh tendencies. The resemblance lay on the surface; the contrast was farther to seek.

It was about three o’clock in the afternoon, and a certain section of society—a gathering, at least, very fairly representative of a certain section—was surging in a good-tempered, aimless, demoralised way in a very fashionable church in Kensington. Some of the demoralisation was due to the occasion—a smart wedding—but the gaiety and the general air of readiness to be pleased which prevailed were as certainly the outcome of the wider spirit of the hour as were the smart spring gowns and the quantities of spring flowers carried or worn by the women. The bridal party had left the church and a general exodus was in progress; progress rendered rather slow by reason of the difficulties attendant on the bringing together of carriages and owners, and involving a considerable crush inside the church door. In the middle of this crush, allowing himself to be pushed and drifted along towards the door, was a man who was apparently too fully occupied in casting keen, comprehensive and reconnoitring looks about him, and in returning the gestures of greeting and welcome which returned his glances on all sides, to take much heed as to the manner or direction of the movement imposed upon him by the moving crowd. It was Marston Loring, and as he finally emerged into the air he was lightly clapped on the shoulder by Lord Garstin, who, a few yards in front of him during their compressed passage out of the building, had waited for him on the pavement.

“Glad to see you back, Loring!” he said. “Heard last night of your arrival. How are you?”

“Not sorry to be back,” returned Loring nonchalantly, as he shook hands. “I’ve come to the conclusion, though, in the course of the last half-hour, that six months is a mere nothing!”

“Are you walking round to the house?” asked Lord Garstin. “So am I. Let me have your news as we go.”

Marston Loring had spent the winter at the Cape. His departure had been alluded to among his smart acquaintances as “a sudden affair” more or less indefinitely connected in their minds with that “business” of which Loring was understood to be a devotee. To Loring himself it had been by no means a sudden thing. That is to say, the necessity for it had been gradually growing up about him in his professional life much against his will, though it had reached a crisis somewhat unexpectedly. He had been absent six months, and this was, practically, his social reappearance; but looking at him as he turned into the street with Lord Garstin, it would have been difficult to believe that he had been away at all; far less that he had passed through any striking experiences of men and life. His keen, cynical, unpleasant face was entirely unaltered; his manner was perfectly calm and unmoved. If he had his observations to make on his return, if the result of those observations was rather exciting than indifferent to him, interest and emotion were still entirely outside his pose.

The talk between the two men, however, as they passed along the streets was such talk as passes when one of the two is occupied in picking up dropped threads, and the other is well calculated, and well satisfied, to help him in the process. In his heart of hearts—if such a spot could have been reached in him—Lord Garstin would probably have confessed to little personal liking for Loring; his cordiality was the result of considerably involved workings of social politics. Just at this moment in particular, with the prestige fresh upon him of sundry smart magazine articles on Cape affairs which he had sent home from time to time, and which had been a good deal talked about, Marston Loring was distinctly a man to be noticed and encouraged.

Details connected with the wedding at which they had just assisted were naturally the first topics that presented themselves. It was Hilda Newton’s wedding; she had been married with much circumstance from Mrs. Halse’s house; and, before Loring left England, it had been said that she was to be married at Christmas at her own home in Yorkshire. About a month before the day fixed for the wedding, however, the aunt with whom she lived had died; the wedding had perforce been postponed, and when it became possible to consider another date, Mrs. Halse—in the absence of any near relation to the bride-elect—had taken the matter in hand.

“A very nice affair she’s made of it!” commented the elder man, as he finished his explanation, interspersed with discursive items of news of all sorts appertaining to society and its doings. “A little loud, of course; that goes without saying; and, really, nowadays it’s rather the thing! A pretty girl in her way, Mrs. Compton. And talking of pretty girls, Maud Pomeroy looked well. They’ve been at Cannes since the end of January; only just back, like yourself.”

“So I heard,” answered Loring indifferently. “By-the-bye, I didn’t see the Romaynes. Aren’t they in town? I’ve not had time to look any one up yet, of course, but I thought I should see Julian to-day.”

Lord Garstin paused a moment before he answered.

“They were there,” he said. “I saw them come in. You’ll see them at the house, no doubt. The little woman’s been invisible for two or three days; ill—rather bad, somebody said.”

“Ill!” echoed Loring; and there was a genuine surprise in his tone which no information yet bestowed upon him had evoked. “Really!” He paused a moment, and then said, with his own peculiar smile: “And how is Julian? Does the hard-working line hold out?”

Lord Garstin smiled, more pleasantly than Loring had done, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Pretty well, I suppose,” he said. “I met his chief the other night, and he was not enthusiastic. He’s a nice boy, though. You’re a great chum of his, aren’t you, Loring?” Loring nodded. “Then let me give you a hint to have an eye to his proceedings at the club. Cards are all very well, you know, but a boy like that should be moderate. You might be able to talk to him about it. I gave his mother a hint a few weeks ago. She’s a nice little woman. See what you can do, will you? I’ve got an idea that the foolish fellow doesn’t play only at the club.”

They were close to Mrs. Halse’s house as Lord Garstin finished, and his last words were spoken quickly and significantly. Loring answered only by a slight movement of his eyebrows, and then they were in the hall, being swept on by a seething crowd to pay their respects to the hostess and the bride.

“Loring, old man! How are you?”

Loring and Lord Garstin had been thrown together again after offering their congratulations, and they were standing side by side. Julian Romayne was close beside them, having come up from behind through the crowd unperceived, his hand eagerly, even demonstratively, outstretched.

Thinking things over in private later on, Marston Loring thought with a cynical smile that if he had not previously realised his six months’ absence, he might have done so when young Romayne’s voice fell on his ear. The change in it, though subtle, was so marked—to the man who had not heard it in course of transition—that it seemed to place years rather than months between their last meeting and the present, and it amply prepared Loring for what he saw when he turned round.

All alteration in manner and appearance consists rather in the accentuation or modification of original characteristics than in the developement of fresh ones; consequently it is very seldom noticed by a casual observer when intercourse is unbroken. To Lord Garstin and to dozens of his other acquaintances, Julian Romayne was still a “nice boy,” just as his good-looking features were still the young features of a year ago. To Loring the difference in face was as perceptible as was the difference in the young man’s whole personality, and the key-note of the difference lay in the absence of genuineness in both; in the deliberate assumption in the present of what had been natural and uncalculated in the past. Julian’s face had grown thinner and harder, and the boyish smile which was in consequence no longer perfectly harmonious was a trifle over-accentuated; while the bright, ingenuous glance of his eyes had grown extraordinarily like his mother. His manner was the gay, young manner which had gained him so many friends, with just that touch of exaggeration added to it which artificiality gives.

His cordiality as he wrung Loring’s hand was rather—like the demonstrative welcome in his voice—admirably adjusted to meet the requirements of the moment than an expression of the man himself. He was very carefully dressed, with a particularly dainty flower in his buttonhole.

“Back again at last, old fellow!” he said buoyantly. “By Jove, what an age it is since you went! And have you had a good time? When did you reach home? Tell us all about it! You’ve no idea how glad I am to have him back, Lord Garstin!” he added, greeting the elder man with a boyish, half-laughing apology for his exuberance which was very effective. His manner to Lord Garstin was as charming as ever; rather more so, indeed, as its frank deference had acquired a polish derived from sundry little artistic touches such as only calculation and intention can bestow.

“You seem to have managed very well without me!” returned Loring, with good-humoured satire. “The world seems to have used you pretty fairly, I’m glad to see! I’ve only been back about forty-eight hours or I should have looked you up, of course. I hope Mrs. Romayne is here?”

“I hope she is better?” said Lord Garstin, with genuine concern. “We have all been desolated over her illness!”

Julian, who had nodded lightly to Loring, turned to Lord Garstin with a bright, affectionate laugh—also very like his mother’s—and to Loring’s quick and alert perception an added touch of artificiality became apparent in his manner as he said:

“It has been desolating, hasn’t it? It’s very good of you to say so, though! Thanks, I am delighted to say she is all right again. We had a terrific encounter as to whether she should or should not come to the affair, and she carried the day.”

“Being perfectly restored to health she didn’t see the force of allowing herself to be shut up and coddled by a silly boy.”

The light, high-pitched voice, somewhat thin, as was the characteristic laugh with which the words were spoken, came from directly behind Julian, and as Loring, who had seen her coming, stepped forward to meet her, Mrs. Romayne, with a passing shake of her son’s arm, stretched out her hand with graceful cordiality.

“Welcome back, Mr. Loring,” she said. “I thought your first visit would have been to this good-for-nothing boy, but I am very glad to meet you here all the same. Lord Garstin,” she continued, as she turned to shake hands, “I believe you were enquiring after my health? I can’t allow good breath to be wasted in that way! I assure you it has been much ado about nothing, and I am perfectly, ridiculously well!”

She laughed as she finished, but a certain strained insistence had grown in her tone as she spoke, as though her desire to impress the fact she stated was strong enough to undermine her control of her voice.

But Loring, looking at her, was too fully occupied in criticising her appearance to notice the tone of her voice. There must have been some society fraud at the bottom of her reported illness, he decided, and that was why she was so anxious to pass it over; for certainly he had never seen her look better. She was admirably dressed, and she was very slightly and skilfully “made up”; a condition new to him in her, and one of which Marston Loring emphatically approved in women past their first youth. He told himself, moreover, that either his impression of her had been fainter than the reality, or else she had actually gained in what he could only define to himself—and define roughly and inadequately as he was well aware—as “grip.” There was the faintest flavour of nerve and concentration behind her admirable society manner, which gave it a wonderful piquancy in the eyes of her observer; a flavour which was evidently quite unconscious and involuntary, and had its origin in ingrain character. Loring admired power—of a certain class—in women.

In his interest in her expression, and his mental comments on it—determined, as they could not fail to be, by his own character—he was deceived by her cleverly arranged colouring into ignoring the almost painful thinness of her face; nor did he understand how hollow and sunken those glittering eyes would have been less cleverly treated.

She replied gaily to Lord Garstin’s gallant reception of her assurance, and then turned again to Loring with an easy interested question on his voyage.

“You are not the only returned traveller to-day!” she said, as he answered her. “By-the-bye, Julian, I was on the way to send you into the other room. There is some one there you will like to see!”

She smiled significantly up at him, patting his arm as she spoke, and Julian answered with boyish eagerness.

“In the other room?” he said. “Well, perhaps I ought just to say how do you do, you know, oughtn’t I? Loring, old fellow, we shall meet again, of course? What are you going to do afterwards? We might go down to the club together? And he must come and dine with us, mustn’t he, mother? Suppose you arrange it!” And with a comprehensive gesture and another, “I’ll just say how do you do, I think!” he disappeared in the crowd.

Mrs. Romayne turned with a shrug of her shoulders and a pretty expressive grimace to the two men.

“Poor boy!” she laughed. “What a thing it is to be young! And what a tantalising spectacle a wedding must be under the circumstances! A pretty wedding, wasn’t it?”

“An ugly wedding would be rather a refreshing change, don’t you think?” suggested Loring. “One has seen a good many pretty ones, if you come to think of it!”

“You’re not in the least changed by six months in Africa,” returned Mrs. Romayne, shaking her head at him prettily. “Now, tell me, really, have you had a good time out there?”

The question was friendly and interested after a society fashion, but the interest was entirely on the surface, and the little talk that followed about Loring’s experiences was joined in as a matter of course by Lord Garstin. It lasted until Mrs. Romayne said lightly:

“And now, I suppose, I ought to follow Julian’s example and ‘just say how do you do, don’t you know!’ I have only seen Mrs. Pomeroy in the distance as yet.”

She nodded, and moved away, stopping constantly on her way through the rooms to exchange scraps of conversation until she came to where Mrs. Pomeroy, amiable, inert, and smiling as though she had been sitting there for the last three months, was holding a small court. She welcomed Mrs. Romayne as she had welcomed all comers.

“So glad to see you,” she said placidly. “Such a long time! And how are you?”

“So immensely pleased to have you back again,” said Mrs. Romayne enthusiastically; there was a ring of genuineness in her voice which the fashionable exaggeration of her speech hardly warranted. “And you really only arrived yesterday? Miss Newton—Mrs. Compton, I mean—was in a dreadful state of mind the other day lest her bridesmaid should fail her. And how is Maud? How sweet she looked! Quite the prettiest of the six. Where is she?”

“She was here just now,” returned Maud’s mother, as though that were quite a satisfactory answer to the question, and then as an afterthought she added vaguely: “I think she went to have an ice; your son took her.”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Romayne, smiling. “Then there is one perfectly happy person in the house!”

Mrs. Pomeroy only smiled with vague blandness; evidently the relations between the Romaynes and the Pomeroys had developed extensively before the departure of the latter for Cannes; and as evidently they were quite undisturbing to Miss Pomeroy’s mother.

“The bridesmaids’ dresses were very nice, I think,” she said, with amiable irrelevancy. “I was afraid they sounded trying. But it has been very pleasant altogether, hasn’t it? I wish we were going to stay in town. We had a shocking crossing.”

A keen attention had sprung into Mrs. Romayne’s eyes, and for an instant it seemed as though all the society gaiety died from her face, leaving exposed the hard, almost fiercely determined, foundation on which it was imposed. Then the foundation disappeared again.

“To stay in town!” she echoed lightly. “Why, are you not going to stay in town, dear Mrs. Pomeroy?”

“Unfortunately not,” was the answer. “My sister who lives in Devonshire—I think you have heard me speak of her?—is ill, and has begged me to go and see her. So we are going for a week or ten days, I am sorry to say.”

“I am sorry to hear,” said Mrs. Romayne, with pretty concern. “Just at the beginning of the season, too. It’s rather hard on poor Maud, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is hard on poor Maud, isn’t it?” was the undisturbed response.

There was a moment’s pause, and then under her paint a burning colour crept up to the very roots of Mrs. Romayne’s hair, and her eyes shone.

“My dear Mrs. Pomeroy,” she began gaily, but speaking rather quickly, too, and in a higher pitch than was usual with her, “don’t you remember, months ago, promising to lend me Maud for a little while? This is the very opportunity. Of course,” she lowered her voice a little, “I wouldn’t propose it if you did not know quite as well as I do how the land lies. But, as I think we two old mothers are of one mind on that point, I shan’t scruple. Let Maud come to me, if she will, while you are in Devonshire. Oh, of course it needn’t mean anything—it’s an old promise, you know, and she and I are great friends on our own account. Talk of the angels!” she went on gaily, nodding towards a slim, white figure coming towards them with Julian in its immediate wake.

Maud Pomeroy was looking as pretty and as proper as she had looked every day since she had emerged from the school-room, but there was a little flush on her face which was not habitual to her. She returned Mrs. Romayne’s greeting with the grateful cordiality so pretty from a girl to an older woman, evinced as was her wont more by manner than by speech; and indeed Mrs. Romayne gave her little time for speech.

“Your mother has been telling me of this dreadful Devonshire business!” she said. “And I’ve had what I flatter myself is a happy thought! I want you to come to me, Maud, dear, while your mother is away. You know you promised ages ago to let yourself be lent to me for a little while, and this is the very opportunity, isn’t it?”

It would not have been “the thing” under the circumstances that any one of the trio should glance at Julian; consequently no one noticed the curious flash of expression that passed across his face as his mother spoke. Maud Pomeroy hesitated and looked dutifully at her mother.

“It’s very kind of Mrs. Romayne, Maud, dear, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Pomeroy with noncommittal amiability.

“It is sweet of her,” responded Maud prettily.

“Well, then, do let us consider it settled. I shall enjoy it of all things. When do you go, dear Mrs. Pomeroy? To-morrow week? Oh, it will be too tantalising to whisk Maud away when she had just begun to enjoy herself; wouldn’t it, Maud?”

Miss Pomeroy hesitated again, and the colour on her cheeks deepened by just a shade. She did not glance at her mother this time.

“Thank you very much,” she said at last. “But shan’t I be a nuisance to you?”

There was just the touch of charmingly conventional demur in her tone which made her submission seem, as all her actions seemed, the result of a gentle, easily influenced temperament. Mrs. Romayne assured her merrily that she would indeed be a terrible nuisance, but that she herself would do her best to bear it, and then rose, her eyes very bright.

“I must run away now,” she said. “I’m so delighted that we’ve settled it. Let me know when to expect you, then, dear. Good-bye, Mrs. Pomeroy; I’ll take every care of your child and return her when you want her—only don’t let it be too soon! I needn’t take you away, sir,” she continued, turning to Julian. He had been standing by ever since that flash had passed over his face with an expression of eager interest in the discussion. “I dare say you’re not in any hurry. No, you need not even come downstairs with me. I see Mr. Loring. He’ll take care of me, I’m sure.”

Mr. Loring, who was within hearing, as the tone of the words implied—indeed, they were more than half addressed to him—came up promptly.

“For how long may I have that privilege?” he said.

She explained to him lightly as he shook hands with Mrs. Pomeroy and her daughter, and then with another farewell and a pretty, affectionate “Au revoir!” to Julian, she turned away with him.

He put her into her carriage and she held out her hand with a gesture of thanks and farewell.

“Thanks,” she said; her tone and manner alike were very friendly and familiar in the exaggerated style which had certainly grown on her; and they seemed to imply something beyond the superficial interest to which she had kept, perforce, in her society intercourse with him. “It is so pleasant to see you again! When will you come to see me quietly? Before you are hard at work, you know! To-morrow, now? To-morrow happens to be a free day with me. Come to tea. Good bye!”