Page:Anthony Hope - The Kings Mirror.djvu/308

 looked; and that while he was between there could be no rude direct contact of her eyes with mine, nor of mine with hers. Onlookers see most of the game, they say, but here the onlookers were as blind as the players; there was an air of congratulation at Artenberg; the King and his bride were drawing closer together. The blindness was complete; Varvilliers himself shared it. Of his absolute good faith and utter unconsciousness I, who doubt most things, can not doubt. Had he been Wetter, I should have been alert for the wry smile and the lift of the brows; but he was his simple self, a perfect gentleman unspoiled by thought. Such are entirely delightful; that they work infinite havoc with established relations between other people seems a small price to pay for the privilege which their existence confers upon the world. My dear friend Varvilliers, for whom my heart is always warm, played the mischief with the relations between Elsa and myself, which we all (very whimsically) supposed him to be improving.

It was a comparatively small, although an interestingly unusual, thing that I came to enjoy Elsa's society coupled with Varvilliers', and not to care much about it taken alone; it was a more serious, though far more ordinary, turn of affairs that Elsa should come to be happy enough with me provided that Varvilliers were there to—shall I say to take the edge off me?—but cared not a jot to meet me in his absence. The latter circumstance is simply and conventionally explained (and, after all, these conventional expressions are no more arbitrary than the alphabet, which is admitted to be a useful means of communicating our ideas) by saying that Elsa was falling in love with Varvilliers; my own state of mind