Page:The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1893).djvu/212

202 that any I should make on Louisa Chantry would be much too clumsy a test. She had been staying at the house at which I was calling; she had come alone, as the people were old friends and, to a certain extent, neighbors, and was going home in a few days. It was a daughterless house, but there was inevitable young life; a couple of girls from the vicarage, a married son and his wife, a young man who had "ridden over," and another young man who was staying.

Louisa Chantry sat opposite to me at luncheon, but too far for conversation, and before we got up I had discovered that if her manner to me had been odd, it was not because she was inanimate. She was, on the contrary, in a state of intense though carefully muffled vibration. There was some fever in her blood, but no one perceived it—no one, that is, with an exception—an exception which was just a part of the very circumstance. This single suspicion was lodged in the breast of the young man whom I have alluded to as staying in the house. He was on the same side of the