CHAPTER XXIV.
If life at Cocker's, with the dreadful drop of August, had lost something of its savour, she had not been slow to infer that a heavier blight had fallen on the graceful industry of Mrs.Jordan.
With Lord Rye and Lady Ventnor and Mrs.Bubb all out of town, with the blinds down on all the homes of luxury, this ingenious woman might well have found her wonderful taste left quite on her hands.

She bore up, however, in a way that began by exciting much of her young friend's esteem; they perhaps even more frequently met as the wine of life flowed less free from other sources, and each, in the lack of better diversion, carried on with more mystification for the other an intercourse that consisted not a little in peeping out and drawing back.

Each waited for the other to commit herself, each profusely curtained for the other the limits of low horizons.

Mrs.Jordan was indeed probably the more reckless skirmisher; nothing could exceed her frequent incoherence unless it was indeed her occasional bursts of confidence.

Her account of her private affairs rose and fell like a flame in the wind--sometimes the bravest bonfire and sometimes a handful of ashes.