When the intimate friend who was his relative appeared with him in her drawing-room and she found standing before her, respectfully appealing for welcome with a delightful smile, this quite incomparably good-looking young man, she was conscious of a secret momentary disturbance and a recognition of the fact that something a shade startling had happened.
"When a thing of the sort occurs entirely without one's aid and rather against one's will--one may as well submit," she said later to Lord Coombe.

"Endeavouring to readjust matters is merely meddling with Fate and always ends in disaster.

As an incident, I felt there was a hint in it that it would be the part of wisdom to leave things alone." She had watched the two dancing with a kind of absorption in her gaze.
She had seen them go out of the room into the conservatory.

She had known exactly when they had returned and, seeing the look on their young faces, had understood why the eyes of the beholders followed them.
When Lord Coombe came in with the ominous story of the assassination at Sarajevo, all else had been swept from her mind.

There had been place in her being for nothing but the shock of a monstrous recognition.