He gazed at her placidly.

“Memnon?”

Before she could answer, the waiter was bringing them fish. It was a curious moment to feel, as she did then suddenly feel, that she had been every kind of damned fool to let Antony go.

When the waiter had gone away she rushed into telling him about Memnon, because not for the world must there be one of those silences. Something in his look, in his dry, light tone, had got under her guard and shaken her as she had not been shaken for years. She must talk, make a good story of her visit, regain her cool direction of events.

When Antony said, “That charlatan!” she was ready with a laugh.

“Perhaps. But, darling, such a thrill! It was worth every penny of what I paid him.”

Antony ’s brows lifted-odd crooked brows, black in a dark sardonic face. Under them his eyes looked black too until the light struck them and showed them grey.

“And what did you pay him?”

“Ten pounds. Don’t tell, will you. We’re frightfully hard up and everything to do to the house, but everyone’s going to him, and one might as well be dead as out of the swim. Actually, I suppose, one’s been dead for years-the war and all that. But now”-she let her eyes meet his-“I’m coming alive again.”

“Very interesting feeling. What did the magician say to you?”

She drew back. No good trying to rush him, he always hated it. Better go on talking about Memnon. She said with a catch in her voice,

“He was-rather creepy.”

“Part of the stock in trade.”

“No, but he really was. He very nearly rattled me.”

Antony looked politely surprised.

“He must be pretty good. What did he do-or say?”

He was looking at her with some attention. The clear, natural colour in her cheeks had ebbed. The women who refused to believe that it owed nothing to art would perforce have been converted.