"Oh yes--she's playing with him." "But with whom, dear ?" "Why, with Petherton.

I thought you knew." "Knew they're playing--- ?" Mrs.Brook was almost Socratic.
"The Missus is regularly wound up," her husband meanwhile, without resonance, observed to Vanderbank.
"Brilliant indeed!" Vanderbank replied.
"But she's rather naughty, you know," Edward after a pause continued.
"Oh fiendish!" his interlocutor said with a short smothered laugh that might have represented for a spectator a sudden start at such a flash of analysis from such a quarter.
When Vanderbank's attention at any rate was free again their hostess, assisted to the transition, was describing the play, as she had called it, of the absentees.

"She has hidden a book and he's trying to find it." "Hide and seek?
Why, isn't it innocent, Mitch!" Mrs.Brook exclaimed.
Mitchy, speaking for the first time, faced her with extravagant gloom.
"Do you really think so ?" "That's HER innocence!" the Duchess laughed to him.
"And don't you suppose he has found it YET ?" Mrs.Brook pursued earnestly to Tishy.

"Isn't it something we might ALL play at if-- ?" On which however, abruptly checking herself, she changed her note.

"Nanda love, please go and invite them to join us." Mitchy, at this, on his ottoman, wheeled straight round to the girl, who looked at him before speaking.