Yet it could not be in her thought to catch a glimpse of her visitor before he should pass into the house, since the entrance to the palace was not through the garden, in which stillness and privacy always reigned.

She wished rather to forestall his arrival by a process of conjecture, and to judge by the expression of her face this attempt gave her plenty to do.

Grave she found herself, and positively more weighted, as by the experience of the lapse of the year she had spent in seeing the world.

She had ranged, she would have said, through space and surveyed much of mankind, and was therefore now, in her own eyes, a very different person from the frivolous young woman from Albany who had begun to take the measure of Europe on the lawn at Gardencourt a couple of years before.

She flattered herself she had harvested wisdom and learned a great deal more of life than this light-minded creature had even suspected.