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 and powder your nose. I'll go in through the door from the garden."

And as they walked across the damp, scented grass, he said, "It would be pleasant if you would join Sybil and me riding in the morning."

"But I haven't been on a horse in years," said Olivia.

Throughout the rest of the evening, while she sat playing bridge with Sabine and O'Hara and the Mannering boy, her mind kept straying from the game into unaccustomed by-ways. It was not, she told herself, that she was even remotely in love with O'Hara; it was only that some one—a man who was no creature of ordinary attractions—had confessed his admiration for her, and so she felt young and giddy and elated. The whole affair was silly. . . and yet, yet, in a strange way, it was not silly at all. She kept thinking of Anson's remarks about his father and old Mrs. Soames, "It's a silly affair"—and of Sybil saying gravely, "Only not middle-aged, like O'Hara," and it occurred to her at the same time that in all her life she felt really young for the first time. She had been young as she sat on the stone bench under the ancient apple-tree, young in spite of everything.

And aloud she would say, "Four spades," and know at once that she should have made no such bid.

She was unnerved, too, by the knowledge that there were, all the while, two pairs of eyes far more absorbed in her than in the game of bridge—the green ones of Sabine and the bright blue ones of O'Hara. She could not look up without encountering the gaze of one or the other; and to protect herself she faced them with a hard, banal little smile which she put in place in the mechanical way used by Miss Egan. It was the sort of smile which made her face feel