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82 resumed the sparkling but still occasionally serious conversation, which they always took up just where they had left off. Each recollected so distinctly the other's last words, each had been thinking over the subject in the interval, and was ready to throw or to receive any new light on it. Lady Gower's eye was upon them, and she could hear all that they said, but there was not a word that she could take exception to. It was simply that they were interested in subjects that did not interest her that she was suspicious, Lady Eveline flattered herself;—but it was the amount of interest, and the looks and tones in which the conversation was conducted, that alarmed that clever woman of the world.

Gerald Staunton was one of her best talkers; she had always liked to place him where he could enliven a dull corner, but she did not like that her niece should appreciate his lively humour, his apt quotations, his fluent narrative so keenly. Nothing he said or did ever jarred on Eveline, his taste was so good, his opinions so just, his criticisms so keen. She was a little ashamed of her omnivorous capacity for novel reading, and her indiscriminating taste for poetry, and was now determined to like and dislike with better judgment, that is to say, with Gerald Staunton's judgment.