"How do you do, Mr. Farll?" she addressed him firmly, in a voice which nevertheless throbbed.
It was Lady Sophia Entwistle.
"How do you do?" he said, taking her offered hand. There was nothing else to do, and nothing else to say. Then Mr. Oxford put out his hand.
"How do you do, Mr. Farll?"
And, taking Mr. Oxford's hated hand, Priam said again, "How do you do?"
It was all just as if there had been no past; the past seemed to have been swallowed up in the ordinariness of the crowded corridor. By all the rules for the guidance of human conduct, Lady Sophia ought to have denounced Priam with outstretched dramatic finger to the contempt of the world as a philanderer with the hearts of trusting women; and he ought to have kicked Mr. Oxford along the corridor for a scheming Hebrew. But they
