Lady Holme was sometimes clairvoyante. At this moment every nerve in her body seemed telling her that the silent girl, who sat there nibbling her lunch composedly, was going to be the rage in London. It did not matter at all whether she had talent or not. Lady Holme saw that directly, as she glanced from one little table to another at the observant, whispering men.

She felt angry with Miss Schley for resembling her in colouring, for resembling her in another respect—capacity for remaining calmly silent in the midst of fashionable chatterboxes.

"Will she?" she said to Mrs. Wolfstein.

"Yes. If she'd never been shipwrecked she'd have been almost entertaining, but—there's Sir Donald Ulford trying to attract your attention."

"Where?"

She looked and saw Sir Donald sitting opposite to the large young man with the contemptuous blue eyes and the chubby mouth. They both seemed very bored. Sir Donald bowed.

"Who is that with him?" asked Lady Holme.

"I don't know," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "He looks like a Cupid who's been through Sandow's school. He oughtn't to wear anything but wings."

"It's Sir Donald's son, Leo," said Lady Cardington.

Pimpernel Schley lifted her eyes for an instant from her plate, glanced at Leo Ulford, and cast them down again.

"Leo Ulford's a blackguard," observed Mrs. Trent. "And when a fair man's a blackguard he's much more dangerous than a dark man."

All the women stared at Leo Ulford with a certain eagerness.

"He's good-looking," said Sally Perceval. "But I always distrust cherubic people. They're bound to do you if they get the chance. Isn't he married?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Trent. "He married a deaf heiress."

"Intelligent of him!" remarked Mrs. Wolfstein. "I always wish I'd married a blind millionaire instead of Henry. Being a Jew, Henry sees not only all there is to see, but all there isn't. Sir Donald and his Cupid son don't seem to have much to say to one another."

"Oh, don't you know that family affection's the dumbest thing on earth?" said Mrs. Trent.

"Too deep for speech," said Lady Manby. "I love to see fathers and sons together, the fathers trying to look younger than they are and the sons older. It's the most comic relationship, and breeds shyness as the West African climate breeds fever."

"I know the whole of the West African coast by heart," declared Miss Burns, wagging her head, and moving her brown hands nervously among her knives and forks. "And I never caught anything there."

"Not even a husband," murmured Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Manby.

"In fact, I never felt better in my life than I did at Old Calabar," continued Miss Burns. "But there my mind was occupied. I was studying the habits of alligators."

"They're very bad, aren't they?" asked Lady Manby, in a tone of earnest inquiry.

"I prefer to study the habits of men," said Sally Perceval, who was always surrounded by a troup of young racing men and athletes, who admired her swimming feats.

"Men are very disappointing, I think," observed Mrs. Trent. "They are like a lot of beads all threaded on one string."

"And what's the string?" asked Sally Perceval.

"Vanity. Men are far vainer than we are. Their indifference to the little arts we practise shows it. A woman whose head is bald covers it with a wig. Without a wig she would feel that she was an outcast totally powerless to attract. But a bald-headed man has no idea of diffidence. He does not bother about a wig because he expects to be adored without one."

"And the worst of it is that he is adored," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "Look at my passion for Henry."

They began to talk about their husbands. Lady Holme did not join in. She and Pimpernel Schley were very silent members of the party. Even Miss Burns, who was—so she said—a spinster by conviction not by necessity, plunged into the husband question, and gave some very daring illustrations of the marriage customs of certain heathen tribes.

Pimpernel Schley hardly spoke at all. When someone, turning to her, asked her what she thought about the subject under discussion, she lifted her pale eyes and said, with the choir-boy drawl:

"I've got no husband and never had one, so I guess I'm no kind of a judge."

"I guess she's a judge of other women's husbands, though," said Mrs. Wolfstein to Lady Cardington. "That child is going to devastate London."

Now and then Lady Holme glanced towards Sir Donald and his son. They seemed as untalkative as she was. Sir Donald kept on looking towards Mrs. Wolfstein's table. So did Leo. But whereas Leo Ulford's eyes were fixed on Pimpernel Schley, Sir Donald's met the eyes of Lady Holme. She felt annoyed; not because Sir Donald was looking at her, but because his son was not.

How these women talked about their husbands! Lady Cardington, who was a widow, spoke of husbands as if they were a race which was gradually dying out. She thought the modern woman was beginning to get a little tired of the institution of matrimony, and to care much less for men than was formerly the case. Being contradicted by Mrs. Trent, she gave her reasons for this belief. One was that whereas American matinee girls used to go mad over the "leading men" of the stage they now went mad over the leading women. She also instanced the many beautiful London women, universally admired, who were over thirty and still remained spinsters. Mrs. Trent declared that they were abnormal, and that, till the end of time, women would always wish to be wives. Mrs. Wolfstein agreed with her on various grounds. One was that it was the instinct of woman to buy and to rule, and that if she were rich she could now acquire a husband as, in former days, people acquired slaves—by purchase. This remark led to the old question of American heiresses and the English nobility, and to a prolonged discussion as to whether or not most women ruled their husbands.

Women nearly always argue from personal experience, and consequently Lady Cardington—whose husband had treated her badly—differed on this point from Mrs. Wolfstein, who always did precisely what she pleased, regardless of Mr. Wolfstein's wishes. Mrs. Trent affirmed that for her part she thought women should treat their husbands as they treated their servants, and dismiss them if they didn't behave themselves, without giving them a character. She had done so twice, and would do it a third time if the occasion arose. Sally Perceval attacked her for this, pleading slangily that men would be men, and that their failings ought to be winked at; and Miss Burns, as usual, brought the marital proceedings of African savages upon the carpet. Lady Manby turned the whole thing into a joke by a farcical description of the Private Enquiry proceedings of a jealous woman of her acquaintance, who had donned a canary-coloured wig as a disguise, and dogged her husband's footsteps in the streets of London, only to find that he went out at odd times to visit a grandmother from whom he had expectations, and who happened to live in St. John's Wood.

The foreign waiters, who moved round the table handing the dishes, occasionally exchanged furtive glances which seemed indicative of suppressed amusement, and the men who were lunching near, many of whom were now smoking cigarettes, became more and more intent upon Mrs. Wolfstein and her guests. As they were getting up to go into the Palm Court for coffee and liqueurs, Lady Cardington again referred to the article on the proposed school for happiness, which had apparently made a deep impression upon her.

"I wonder if happiness can be taught," she said. "If it can—"

"It can't," said Mrs. Trent, with more than her usual sledge-hammer bluntness. "We aren't meant to be happy here."

"Who doesn't mean us to be happy?" asked poor Lady Cardington in a deplorable voice.

"First—our husbands."

"It's cowardly not to be happy," cried Miss Burns, pushing her hat over her left eye as a tribute to the close of lunch. "In a savage state you'll always find—"

The remainder of her remark was lost in the frou-frou of skirts as the eight women began slowly to thread their way between the tables to the door.

Lady Holme found herself immediately behind Miss Schley, who moved with impressive deliberation and the extreme composure of a well-brought-up child thoroughly accustomed to being shown off to visitors. Her straw-coloured hair was done low in the nape of her snowy neck, and, as she took her little steps, her white skirt trailed over the carpet behind her with a sort of virginal slyness. As she passed Leo Ulford it brushed gently against him, and he drummed the large fingers of his left hand with sudden violence on the tablecloth, at the same time pursing his chubby lips and then opening his mouth as if he were going to say something.

Sir Donald rose and bowed. Mrs. Wolfstein murmured a word to him in passing, and they had not been sipping their coffee for more than two or three minutes before he joined them with his son.

Sir Donald came up at once to Lady Holme.

"May I present my son to you, Lady Holme?" he said.

"Certainly."

"Leo, I wish to introduce you to Lady Holme."

Leo Ulford bowed rather ungracefully. Standing up he looked more than ever like a huge boy, and he had much of the expression that is often characteristic of huge boys—an expression in which impudence seems to float forward from a background of surliness.

Lady Holme said nothing. Leo Ulford sat down beside her in an armchair.

"Better weather," he remarked.

Then he called a waiter, and said to him, in a hectoring voice:

"Bring me a Kummel and make haste about it."

He lit a cigarette that was almost as big as a cigar, and turned again to Lady Holme.

"I've been in the Sahara gazelle shooting," he continued.

He spoke in a rather thick, lumbering voice and very loud, probably because he was married to a deaf woman.

"Just come back," he added.

"Oh!" said Lady Holme.

She was sitting perfectly upright on her chair, and noticed that her companion's eyes travelled calmly and critically over her figure with an unveiled deliberation that was exceptionally brazen even in a modern London man. Lady Holme did not mind it. Indeed, she rather liked it. She knew at once, by that look, the type of man with whom she had to deal. In Leo Ulford there was something of Lord Holme, as in Pimpernel Schley there was perhaps a touch of herself. Having finished his stare, Leo Ulford continued:

"Jolly out there. No rot. Do as you like and no one to bother you. Gazelle are awfully shy beasts though."

"They must have suited you," said Lady Holme, very gravely.

"Why?" he asked, taking the glass of Kummel which the waiter had brought and setting it down on a table by him.

"Aren't you a shy—er—beast?"

He stared at her calmly for a moment, and then said:

"I say, you're too sharp, Lady Holme."

He turned his head towards Pimpernel Schley, who was sitting a little way off with her soft, white chin tucked well in, looking steadily down into a cup half full of Turkish coffee and speaking to nobody.

"Who's that girl?" he asked.

"That's Miss Pimpernel Schley. A pretty name, isn't it?"

"Is it? An American of course."

"Of course."

"What cheek they have? What's she do?"

"I believe she acts in—well, a certain sort of plays."

A slow smile overspread Leo Ulford's face and made him look more like a huge boy than ever.

"What certain sort?" he asked. "The sort I'd like?"

"Very probably. But I know nothing of your tastes."

She did—everything almost. There are a good many Leo Ulfords lounging about London.

"I like anything that's a bit lively, with no puritanic humbug about it."

"Well, you surely can't suppose that there can be any puritanic humbug about Miss Schley or anything she has to do with!"

He glanced again at Pimpernel Schley and then at Lady Holme. The smile on his face became a grin. Then his huge shoulders began to shake gently.

"I do love talking to women," he said, on the tide of a prolonged chuckle. "When they aren't deaf."

Lady Holme still remained perfectly grave.

"Do you? Why?" she inquired.

"Can't you guess why?"

"Our charity to our sister women?"

She was smiling now.

"You teach me such a lot," he said.

He drank his Kummel.

"I always learn something when I talk to a woman. I've learnt something from you."

Lady Holme did not ask him what it was. She saw that he was now more intent on her than he had been on Miss Schley, and she got up to go, feeling more cheerful than she had since she left the atelier of "Cupido."

"Don't go."

"I must."

"Already! May I come and call?"

"Your father knows my address."

"Oh, I say—but—"

"You're not going already!" cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was having a second glass of Benedictine and beginning to talk rather outrageously and with a more than usually pronounced foreign accent.

"I must, really."

"I'm afraid my son has bored you," murmured Sir Donald, in his worn-out voice.

"No, I like him," she replied, loud enough for Leo to hear.

Sir Donald did not look particularly gratified at this praise of his achievement. Lady Holme took an airy leave of everybody. When she came to Pimpernel Schley she said:

"I wish you a great success, Miss Schley."

"Many thanks," drawled the vestal virgin, who was still looking into her coffee cup.

"I must come to your first night. Have you ever acted in London?"

"Never."

"You won't be nervous?"

"Nervous! Don't know the word."

She bent to sip her coffee.

When Lady Holme reached the door of the Carlton, and was just entering one of the revolving cells to gain the pavement, she heard Lady Cardington's low voice behind her.

"Let me drive you home, dear."

At the moment she felt inclined to be alone. She had even just refused Sir Donald's earnest request to accompany her to her carriage. Had any other woman made her this offer she would certainly have refused it. But few people refused any request of Lady Cardington's. Lady Holme, like the rest of the world, felt the powerful influence that lay in her gentleness as a nerve lies in a body. And then had she not wept when Lady Holme sang a tender song to her? In a moment they were driving up the Haymarket together in Lady Cardington's barouche.

The weather had grown brighter. Wavering gleams of light broke through the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it walks through London ways, bearing itself half nervously, like a country cousin.

"I don't like this time of year," said Lady Cardington.

She was leaning back and glancing anxiously about her.

"But why not?" asked Lady Holme. "What's the matter with it?"

"Youth."

"But surely—"

"The year's too young. And at my age one feels very often as if the advantage of youth were an unfair advantage."

"Dare I ask—?"

She checked herself, looking at her companion's snow-white hair, which was arranged in such a way that it looked immensely thick under the big black hat she wore—a hat half grandmotherly and half coquettish, that certainly suited her to perfection.

"Spring—" she was beginning rather quickly; but Lady Cardington interrupted her.

"Fifty-eight," she said.

She laughed anxiously and looked at Lady Holme.

"Didn't you think I was older?"

"I don't know that I ever thought about it," replied Lady Holme, with the rather careless frankness she often used towards women.

"Of course not. Why should you, or anyone? When a woman's once over fifty it really doesn't matter much whether she's fifty-one or seventy-one. Does it?"

Lady Holme thought for a moment. Then she said:

"I really don't know. You see, I'm not a man."

Lady Cardington's forehead puckered and her mouth drooped piteously.

"A woman's real life is very short," she said. "But her desire for real life can last very long—her silly, useless desire."

"But if her looks remain?"

"They don't."

"You think it is a question of looks?"

"Do you think it is?" asked Lady Cardington. "But how can you know anything about it, at your age, and with your appearance?"

"I suppose we all have our different opinions as to what men are and what men want," Lady Holme said, more thoughtfully than usual.

"Men! Men!" Lady Cardington exclaimed, with a touch of irritation unusual in her. "Why should we women do, and be, everything for men?"

"I don't know, but we do and we are. There are some men, though, who think it isn't a question of looks, or think they think so."

"Who?" said Lady Cardington, quickly.

"Oh, there are some," answered Lady Holme, evasively, "who believe in mental charm more than in physical charm, or say they do. And mental charm doesn't age so obviously as physical—as the body does, I suppose. Perhaps we ought to pin our faith to it. What do you think of Miss Schley?"

Lady Cardington glanced at her with a kind of depressed curiosity.

"She pins her faith to the other thing," she said.

"Yes."

"She's pretty. Do you know she reminds me faintly of you."

Lady Holme felt acute irritation at this remark, but she only said:

"Does she?"

"Something in her colouring. I'm sure she's a man's woman, but I can't say I found her interesting."

"Men's women seldom are interesting to us. They don't care to be," said Lady Holme.

Suddenly she thought that possibly between Pimpernel Schley and herself there were resemblances unconnected with colouring.

"I suppose not. But still—ah, here's Cadogan Square!"

She kissed Lady Holme lightly on the cheek.

"Fifty-eight!" Lady Holme said to herself as she went into the house. "Just think of being fifty-eight if one has been a man's woman! Perhaps it's better after all to be an everybody's woman. Well, but how's it done?"

She looked quite puzzled as she came into the drawing-room, where Robin Pierce had been waiting impatiently for twenty minutes.

"Robin," she said seriously, "I'm very unhappy."

"Not so unhappy as I have been for the last half hour," he said, taking her hand and holding it. "What is it?"

"I'm dreadfully afraid I'm a man's woman. Do you think I am?"

He could not help smiling as he looked into her solemn eyes.

"I do indeed. Why should you be upset about it?"

"I don't know. Lady Cardington's been saying things—and I met a rather abominable little person at lunch, a little person like a baby that's been about a great deal in a former state, and altogether—Let's have tea."

"By all means."

"And now soothe me, Robin. I'm dreadfully strung up. Soothe me. Tell me, I'm an everybody's woman and that I shall never be de trop in the world—not even when I'm fifty-eight."



CHAPTER VI

THE success of Pimpernel Schley in London was great and immediate, and preceded her appearance upon the stage. To some people, who thought they knew their London, it was inexplicable. Miss Schley was pretty and knew how to dress. These facts, though of course denied by some, as all facts in London are, were undeniable. But Miss Schley had nothing to say. She was not a brilliant talker, as so many of her countrywomen are. She was not vivacious in manner, except on rare occasions. She was not interested in all the questions of the day. She was not—a great many things. But she was one thing.

She was exquisitely sly.

Her slyness was definite and pervasive. In her it took the place of wit. It took the place of culture. It even took the place of vivacity. It was a sort of maid-of-all-work in her personality and never seemed to tire. The odd thing was that it did not seem to tire others. They found it permanently piquant. Men said of Miss Schley, "She's a devilish clever little thing. She don't say much, but she's up to every move on the board." Women were impressed by her. There was something in her supreme and snowy composure that suggested inflexible will. Nothing ever put her out or made her look as if she were in a false position.

London was captivated by the abnormal combination of snow and slyness which she presented to it, and began at once to make much of her.

At one time the English were supposed to be cold; and rather gloried in the supposition. But recently a change has taken place in the national character—at any rate as exhibited in London. Rigidity has gone out of fashion. It is condemned as insular, and unless you are cosmopolitan nowadays you are nothing, or worse than nothing. The smart Englishwoman is beginning to be almost as restless as a Neapolitan. She is in a continual flutter of movement, as if her body were threaded with trembling wires. She uses a great deal of gesture. She is noisy about nothing. She is vivacious at all costs, and would rather suggest hysteria than British phlegm.

Miss Schley's calm was therefore in no danger of being drowned in any pervasive calm about her. On the contrary, it stood out. It became very individual. Her composed speechlessness in the midst of uneasy chatter—the Englishwoman is seldom really self-possessed—carried with it a certain dignity which took the place of breeding. She was always at her ease, and to be always at your ease makes a deep impression upon London, which is full of self-consciousness.

She began to be the fashion at once. A great lady, who had a passion for supplying smart men with what they wanted, saw that they were going to want Miss Schley and promptly took her up. Other women followed suit. Miss Schley had a double triumph. She was run after by women as well as by men. She got her little foot in everywhere, and in no time. Her personal character was not notoriously bad. The slyness had taken care of that. But even if it had been, if only the papers had not been too busy in the matter, she might have had success. Some people do whose names have figured upon the evening bills exposed at the street corners. Hers had not and was not likely to. It was her art to look deliberately pure and good, and to suggest, in a way almost indefinable and very perpetual, that she could be anything and everything, and perhaps had been, under the perfumed shadow of the rose. The fact that the suggestion seemed to be conveyed with intention was the thing that took corrupt old London's fancy and made Miss Schley a pet.

Her name of Pimpernel was not against her.

Men liked it for its innocence, and laughed as they mentioned it in the clubs, as who should say:

"We know the sort of Pimpernel we mean."

Miss Schley's social success brought her into Lady Holme's set, and people noticed, what Lady Holme had been the first to notice, the faint likeness between them. Lady Holme was not exquisitely sly. Her voice was not like a choir-boy's; her manner was not like the manner of an image; her eyes were not for ever cast down. Even her characteristic silence was far less perpetual than the equally characteristic silence of Miss Schley. But men said they were the same colour. What men said women began to think, and it was not an assertion wholly without foundation. At a little distance there was an odd resemblance in the one white face and fair hair to the other. Miss Schley's way of moving, too, had a sort of reference to Lady Holme's individual walk. There were several things characteristic of Lady Holme which Miss Schley seemed to reproduce, as it were, with a sly exaggeration. Her hair was similar, but paler, her whiteness more dead, her silence more perpetual, her composure more enigmatically serene, her gait slower, with diminished steps.

It was all a little like an imitation, with just a touch of caricature added.

One or two friends remarked upon it to Lady Holme, who heard them very airily.

"Are we alike?" she said. "I daresay, but you mustn't expect me to see it. One never knows the sort of impression one produces on the world. I think Miss Schley a very attractive little creature, and as to her social gifts, I bow to them."

"But she has none," cried Mrs. Wolfstein, who was one of those who had drawn Lady Holme's attention to the likeness.

"How can you say so? Everyone is at her feet."

"Her feet, perhaps. They are lovely. But she has no gifts. That's why she gets on. Gifted people are a drug in the market. London's sick of them. They worry. Pimpernel's found that out and gone in for the savage state. I mean mentally of course."

"Her mind dwells in a wigwam," said Lady Manby. "And wears glass beads and little bits of coloured cloth."

"But her acting?" asked Lady Holme, with careless indifference.

"Oh, that's improper but not brilliant," said Mrs. Wolfstein. "The American critics says it's beneath contempt."

"But not beneath popularity, I suppose?" said Lady Holme.

"No, she's enormously popular. Newspaper notices don't matter to Pimpernel. Are you going to ask her to your house? You might. She's longing to come. Everybody else has, and she knew you first."

Lady Holme began to realise why she could never like Mrs. Wolfstein. The latter would try to manage other people's affairs.

"I had no idea she would care about it," she answered, rather coldly.

"My dear—an American! And your house! You're absurdly modest. She's simply pining to come. May I tell her to?"

"I should prefer to invite her myself," said Lady Holme, with a distinct touch of hauteur which made Mrs. Wolfstein smile maliciously.

When Lady Holme was alone she realised that she had, half unconsciously, meant that Miss Schley should find that there was at any rate one house in London whose door did not at once fly open to welcome her demure presence. But now? She certainly did not intend to be a marked exception to a rule that was apparently very general. If people were going to talk about her exclusion of Miss Schley, she would certainly not exclude her. She asked herself why she wished to, and said to herself that Miss Schley's slyness bored her. But she knew that the real reason of the secret hostility she felt towards the American was the fact of their resemblance to each other. Until Miss Schley appeared in London she—Viola Holme—had been original both in her beauty and in her manner of presenting it to the world. Miss Schley was turning her into a type.

It was too bad. Any woman would have disliked it.

She wondered whether Miss Schley recognised the likeness. But of course people had spoken to her about it. Mrs. Wolfstein was her bosom friend. The Jewess had met her first at Carlsbad and, with that terrible social flair which often dwells in Israel, had at once realised her fitness for a London success and resolved to "get her over." Women of the Wolfstein species are seldom jealously timorous of the triumphs of other women. A certain coarse cleverness, a certain ingrained assurance and unconquerable self-confidence keeps them hardy. And they generally have a noble reliance on the power of the tongue. Being incapable of any fear of Miss Schley, Mrs. Wolfstein, ever on the look-out for means of improving her already satisfactory position in the London world, saw one in the vestal virgin and resolved to launch her in England. She was delighted with the result. Miss Schley had already added several very desirable people to the Wolfstein visiting-list. In return "Henry" had "put her on to" one or two very good things in the City. Everything would be most satisfactory if only Lady Holme were not tiresome about the Cadogan Square door.

"She hates you, Pimpernel," said Mrs. Wolfstein to her friend.

"Why?" drawled Miss Schley.

"You know why perfectly well. You reproduce her looks. I'm perfectly certain she's dreading your first night. She's afraid people will begin to think that extraordinary colourless charm she and you possess stagey. Besides, you have certain mannerisms—you don't imitate her, Pimpernel?"

The pawnbroking expression was remarkably apparent for a moment in Mrs. Wolfstein's eyes.

"I haven't started to yet."

"Yet?"

"Well, if she don't ask me to number thirty-eight—'tis thirty-eight?"

"Forty-two."

"Forty-two Cadogan Square, I might be tempted. I came out as a mimic, you know, at Corsher and Byall's in Philadelphia."

Miss Schley gazed reflectively upon the brown carpet of Mrs. Wolfstein's boudoir.

"Folks said I wasn't bad," she added meditatively.

"I think I ought to warn Viola," said Mrs. Wolfstein.

She was peculiarly intimate with people of distinction when they weren't there. Miss Schley looked as if she had not heard. She often did when anything of importance to her was said. It was important to her to be admitted to Lady Holme's house. Everybody went there. It was one of the very smartest houses in London, and since everybody knew that she had been introduced to Lady Holme, since half the world was comparing their faces and would soon begin to compare their mannerisms—well, it would be better that she should not be forced into any revival of her Philadelphia talents.

Mrs. Wolfstein did not warn Lady Holme. She was far too fond of being amused to do anything so short-sighted. Indeed, from that moment she was inclined to conspire to keep the Cadogan Square door shut against her friend. She did not go so far as that; for she had a firm faith in Pimpernel's cuteness and was aware that she would be found out. But she remained passive and kept her eyes wide open.

Miss Schley was only going to act for a month in London. Her managers had taken a theatre for her from the first of June till the first of July. As she was to appear in a play she had already acted in all over the States, and as her American company was coming over to support her, she had nothing to do in the way of preparation. Having arrived early in the year, she had nearly three months of idleness to enjoy. Her conversation with Mrs. Wolfstein took place in the latter days of March. And it was just at this period that Lady Holme began seriously to debate whether she should, or should not, open her door to the American. She knew Miss Schley was determined to come to her house. She knew her house was one of those to which any woman setting out on the conquest of London would wish to come. She did not want Miss Schley there, but she resolved to invite her if peopled talked too much about her not being invited. And she wished to be informed if they did. One day she spoke to Robin Pierce about it. Lord Holme's treatment of Carey had not yet been applied to him. They met at a private view in Bond Street, given by a painter who was adored by the smart world, and, as yet, totally unknown in every other circle. The exhibition was of portraits of beautiful women, and all the beautiful women and their admirers crowded the rooms. Both Lady Holme and Miss Schley had been included among the sitters of the painter, and—was it by chance or design?—their portraits hung side by side upon the brown-paper-covered walls. Lady Holme was not aware of this when she caught Robin's eye through a crevice in the picture hats and called him to her with a little nod.

"Is there tea?"

"Yes. In the last room."

"Take me there. Oh, there's Ashley Greaves. Avoid him, like a dear, till I've looked at something."

Ashley Greaves was the painter. There was nothing of the Bohemian about him. He looked like a heavy cavalry officer as he stood in the centre of the room talking to a small, sharp-featured old lady in a poke bonnet.

"He's safe. Lady Blower's got hold of him."

"Poor wretch! She ought to have a keeper. Strong tea, Robin."

They found a settee in a corner walled in by the backs of tea-drinking beauties.

"I want to ask you something," said Lady Holme, confidentially. "You go about and hear what they're saying."

"And greater nonsense it seems each new season."

"Nonsense keeps us alive."

"Is it the oxygen self-administered by an almost moribund society?"

"It's the perfume that prevents us from noticing the stuffiness of the room. But, Robin, tell me—what is the nonsense of now?"

"Religious, political, theatrical, divorce court or what, Lady Holme?"

He looked at her with a touch of mischief in his dark face, which told her, and was meant to tell her, that he was on the alert, and had divined that she had a purpose in thus pleasantly taking possession of him.

"Oh, the people—nonsense. You know perfectly what I mean."

"Whom are they chattering about most at the moment? You'll be contemptuous if I tell you."

"It's a woman, then?"

"When isn't it?"

"Do I know her?"

"Slightly."

"Well?"

"Miss Schley."

"Really?"

Lady Holme's voice sounded perfectly indifferent and just faintly surprised. There was no hint of irritation in it.

"And what are they saying about Miss Schley?" she added, sipping her tea and glancing about the crowded room.

"Oh, many things, and among the many one that's more untrue than all the rest put together."

"What's that?"

"It's too absurd. I don't think I'll tell you."

"But why not? If it's too absurd it's sure to be amusing."

"I don't think so."

His voice sounded almost angry.

"Tell me, Robin."

He looked at her quickly with a warm light in his dark eyes.

"If you only knew how I—"

"Hush! Go on about Miss Schley."

"They're saying that she's wonderfully like you, and that—have some more tea?"

"That—?"

"That you hate it."

Lady Holme smiled, as if she were very much entertained.

"But why should I hate it?"

"I don't know. But women invent reasons for everything."

"What have they invented for this?"

"Oh—well—that you like to—I can't tell you it all, really. But in substance it comes to this! They are saying, or implying—"

"Implication is the most subtle of the social arts."

"It's the meanest—implying that all that's natural to you, that sets you apart from others, is an assumption to make you stand out from the rest of the crowd, and that you hate Miss Schley because she happens to have assumed some of the same characteristics, and so makes you seem less unique than you did before."

Lady Holme said nothing for a moment. Then she remarked:

"I'm sure no woman said 'less unique.'"

"Why not?"

"Now did anyone? Confess!"

"What d'you suppose they did say?"

"More commonplace."

He could not help laughing.

"As if you were ever commonplace!" he exclaimed, rather relieved by her manner.

"That's not the question. But then Miss Schley's said to be like me not only in appearance but in other ways? Are we really so Siamese?"

"I can't see the faintest beginning of a resemblance."

"Ah, now you're falling into exaggeration in the other direction."

"Well, not in realities. Perhaps in one or two trifling mannerisms—I believe she imitates you deliberately."

"I think I must ask her to the house."

"Why should you?"

"Well, perhaps you might tell me."

"I don't understand."

"Aren't people saying that the reason I don't ask her is because I am piqued at the supposed resemblance between us?"

"Oh, people will say anything. If we are to model our lives according to their ridiculous ideas—"

"Well, but we do."

"Unless we follow the dictates of our own natures, our own souls."

He lowered his voice almost to a whisper.

"Be yourself, be the woman who sings, and no one—not even a fool—will ever say again that you resemble a nonentity like Miss Schley. You see—you see now that even socially it is a mistake not to be your real self. You can be imitated by a cute little Yankee who has neither imagination nor brains, only the sort of slyness that is born out of the gutter."

"My dear Robin, remember where we are. You—a diplomatist!"

She put her finger to her lips and got up.

"We must look at something or Ashley Greaves will be furious."

They made their way into the galleries, which were almost impassable. In the distance Lady Holme caught sight of Miss Schley with Mrs. Wolfstein. They were surrounded by young men. She looked hard at the American's pale face, saying to herself, "Is that like me? Is that like me?" Her conversation with Robin Pierce had made her feel excited. She had not shown it. She had seemed, indeed, almost oddly indifferent. But something combative was awake within her. She wondered whether the American was consciously imitating her. What an impertinence! But Miss Schley was impertinence personified. Her impertinence was her raison d'etre. Without it she would almost cease to be. She would at any rate be as nothing.

Followed by Robin, Lady Holme made her way slowly towards the Jewess and the American.

They were now standing together before the pictures, and had been joined by Ashley Greaves, who was beginning to look very warm and expressive, despite his cavalry moustache. Their backs were towards the room, and Lady Holme and Robin drew near to them without being perceived. Mrs. Wolfstein had a loud voice and did not control it in a crowd. On the contrary, she generally raised it, as if she wished to be heard by those whom she was not addressing.

"Sargent invariably brings out the secret of his sitters," she was saying to Ashley Greaves as Lady Holme and Robin came near and stood for an instant wedged in by people, unable to move forward or backward. "You've brought out the similarities between Pimpernel and Lady Holme. I never saw anything so clever. You show us not only what we all saw but what we all passed over though it was there to see. There is an absurd likeness, and you've blazoned it."

Robin stole a glance at his companion. Ashley Greaves said, in a thin voice that did not accord with his physique:

"My idea was to indicate the strong link there is between the English woman and the American woman. If I may say so, these two portraits, as it were, personify the two countries, and—er—and—er—"

His mind appeared to give way. He strove to continue, to say something memorable, conscious of his conspicuous and central position. But his intellect, possibly over-heated and suffering from lack of air, declined to back him up, and left him murmuring rather hopelessly:

"The one nation—er—and the other—yes—the give and take—the give and take. You see my meaning? Yes, yes."

Miss Schley said nothing. She looked at Lady Holme's portrait and at hers with serenity, and seemed quite unconscious of the many eyes fastened upon her.

"You feel the strong link, I hope, Pimpernel?" said Mrs. Wolfstein, with her most violent foreign accent. "Hands across the Herring Pond!"

"Mr. Greaves has been too cute for words," she replied. "I wish Lady Holme could cast her eye on them."

She looked up at nothing, with a sudden air of seeing something interesting that was happening along way off.

"Philadelphia!" murmured Mrs. Wolfstein, with an undercurrent of laughter.

It was very like Lady Holme's look when she was singing. Robin Pierce saw it and pressed his lips together. At this moment the crowd shifted and left a gap through which Lady Holme immediately glided towards Ashley Greaves. He saw her and came forward to meet her with eagerness, holding out his hand, and smiling mechanically with even more than his usual intention.

"What a success!" she said.

"If it is, your portrait makes it so."

"And where is my portrait?"

Robin Pierce nipped in the bud a rather cynical smile. The painter wiped his forehead with a white silk handkerchief.

"Can't you guess? Look where the crowd is thickest."

The people had again closed densely round the two pictures.

"You are an artist in more ways than one, I'm afraid," said Lady Holme. "Don't turn my head more than the heat has."

The searching expression, that indicated the strong desire to say something memorable, once more contorted the painter's face.

"He who would essay to fix beauty on canvas," he began, in a rather piercing voice, "should combine two gifts."

He paused and lifted his upper lip two or three times, employing his under-jaw as a lever.

"Yes?" said Lady Holme, encouragingly.

"The gift of the brush which perpetuates and the gift of—er—gift of the—"

His intellect once more retreated from him into some distant place and left him murmuring:

"Beauty demands all, beauty demands all. Yes, yes! Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Isn't it so?"

He tugged at his large moustache, with an abrupt assumption of the cavalry officer's manner, which he doubtless deemed to be in accordance with his momentary muddle-headedness.

"And you give it what it wants most—the touch of the ideal. It blesses you. Can we get through?"

She had glanced at Robin while she spoke the first words. Ashley Greaves, with an expression of sudden relief, began very politely to hustle the crowd, which yielded to his persuasive shoulders, and Lady Holme found herself within looking distance of the two portraits, and speaking distance of Mrs. Wolfstein and Miss Schley. She greeted them with a nod that was more gay and friendly than her usual salutations to women, which often lacked bonhomie. Mrs. Wolfstein's too expressive face lit up.

"The sensation is complete!" she exclaimed loudly.

"Hope you're well," murmured Miss Schley, letting her pale eyes rest on Lady Holme for about a quarter of a second, and then becoming acutely attentive to vacancy.

Lady Holme was now in front of the pictures. She looked at Miss Schley's portrait with apparent interest, while Mrs. Wolfstein looked at her with an interest that was maliciously real.

"Well?" said Mrs. Wolfstein. "Well?"

"There's an extraordinary resemblance!" said Lady Holme. "It's wonderfully like."

"Even you see it! Ashley, you ought to be triumphant—"

"Wonderfully like—Miss Schley," added Lady Holme, cutting gently through Mrs. Wolfstein's rather noisy outburst.

She turned to the American.

"I have been wondering whether you won't come in one day and see my little home. Everyone wants you, I know, but if you have a minute some Wednesday—"

"I'll be delighted."

"Next Wednesday, then?"

"Thanks. Next Wednesday."

"Cadogan Square—the red book will tell you. But I'll send cards. I must be running away now."

When she had gone, followed by Robin, Mrs. Wolfstein said to Miss Schley:

"She's been conquered by fear of Philadelphia."

"Wait till I give her Noo York," returned the American, placidly.

It seemed that Lady Holme's secret hostility to Miss Schley was returned by the vestal virgin.



CHAPTER VII

LORD HOLME seldom went to parties and never to private views. He thought such things "all damned rot." Few functions connected with the arts appealed to his frankly Philistine spirit, which rejoiced in celebrations linked with the glories of the body; boxing and wrestling matches, acrobatic performances, weight-lifting exhibitions, and so forth. He regretted that bear-baiting and cock-fighting were no longer legal in England, and had, on two occasions, travelled from London to South America solely in order to witness prize fights.

As he so seldom put in an appearance at smart gatherings he had not yet encountered Miss Schley, nor had he heard a whisper of her much-talked-of resemblance to his wife. Her name was known to him as that of a woman whom one or two of his "pals" began to call a "deuced pretty girl" but his interest in her was not greatly awakened. The number of deuced pretty girls that had been in his life, and in the lives of his pals, was legion. They came and went like feathers dancing on the wind. The mere report of them, therefore, casual and drifting, could not excite his permanent attention, or fix their names and the record of their charms in his somewhat treacherous memory. Lady Holme had not once mentioned the American to him. She was a woman who knew how to be silent, and sometimes she was silent by instinct without saying to herself why.

Lord Holme never appeared on her Wednesdays; and, indeed, those days were a rather uncertain factor among the London joys. If Lady Holme was to be found in her house at all, she was usually to be found on a Wednesday afternoon. She herself considered that she was at home on Wednesdays, but this idea of hers was often a mere delusion, especially when the season had fully set in. There were a thousand things to be done. She frequently forgot what the day of the week was. Unluckily she forgot it on the Wednesday succeeding her invitation to Miss Schley. The American duly turned up in Cadogan Square and was informed that Lady Holme was not to be seen. She left her card and drove away in her coupe with a decidedly stony expression upon her white face.

That day it chanced that Lord Holme came in just before his wife and carelessly glanced over the cards which had been left during the afternoon. He was struck by the name of Pimpernel. It tickled his fancy somehow. As he looked at it he grinned. He looked at it again and vaguely recalled some shreds of the club gossip about Miss Schley's attractions. When Lady Holme walked quietly into her drawing-room two or three minutes later he met her with Miss Schley's card in his hand.

"What have you got there, Fritz?" she said.

He gave her the card.

"You never told me you'd run up against her," he remarked.

Lady Holme looked at the card and then, quickly, at her husband.

"Why—do you know Miss Schley?" she asked.

"Not I."

"Well then?"

"Fellows say she's deuced takin'. That's all. And she's got a fetchin' name—eh? Pimpernel."

He repeated it twice and began to grin once more, and to bend and straighten his legs in the way which sometimes irritated his wife. Lady Holme was again looking at the card.

"Surely it isn't Wednesday?" she said.

"Yes, it is. What did you think it was?"

"Tuesday—Monday—I don't know."

"Where'd you meet her?"

"Whom? Miss Schley? At the Carlton. A lunch of Amalia Wolfstein's."

"Is she pretty?"

"Yes."

There was no hesitation before the reply.

"What colour?

"Oh!—not Albino."

Lord Holme stared.

"What d'you mean by that, girlie?"

"That Miss Schley is remarkably fair—fairer than I am."

"Is she as pretty as you?

"You can find out for yourself. I'm going to ask her to something—presently."

In the last word, in the pause that preceded it, there was the creeping sound of the reluctance Lady Holme felt in allowing Miss Schley to draw any closer to her life. Lord Holme did not notice it. He only said:

"Right you are. Pimpernel—I should like to have a squint at her."

"Very well. You shall."

"Pimpernel," repeated Lord Holme, in a loud bass voice, as he lounged out of the room, grinning. The name tickled his fancy immensely. That was evident.

Lady Holme fully intended to ask Miss Schley to the "something" already mentioned immediately. But somehow several days slipped by and it was difficult to find an unoccupied hour. The Holme cards had, of course, duly gone to the Carlton, but there the matter had ended, so far as Lady Holme was concerned. Miss Schley, however, was not so heedless as the woman she resembled. She began to return with some assiduity to the practice of the talent of the old Philadelphia days. In those days she used to do a "turn" in the course of which she imitated some of the popular public favourites of the States, and for each of her imitations she made up to resemble the person mimicked. She now concentrated this talent upon Lady Holme, but naturally the methods she employed in Society were far more subtle than those she had formerly used upon the stage. They were scarcely less effective. She slightly changed her fashion of doing her hair, puffing it out less at the sides, wearing it a little higher at the back. The change accentuated her physical resemblance to Lady Holme. She happened to get the name of the dressmaker who made most of the latter's gowns, and happened to give her an order that was executed with remarkable rapidity. But all this was only the foundation upon which she based, as it were, the structure of her delicate revenge.

That consisted in a really admirable hint—it could not be called more—of Lady Holme's characteristic mannerisms.

Lady Holme was not an affected woman, but, like all women of the world who are greatly admired and much talked about, she had certain little ways of looking, moving, speaking, being quiet, certain little habits of laughter, of gravity, that were her own property. Perhaps originally natural to her, they had become slightly accentuated as time went on, and many tongues and eyes admired them. That which had been unconscious had become conscious. The faraway look came a little more abruptly, went a little more reluctantly; than it had in the young girl's days. The wistful smile lingered more often on the lips of the twenties than on the lips of the teens. Few noticed any change, perhaps, but there had been a slight change, and it made things easier for Miss Schley.

Her eye was observant although it was generally cast down. Society began to smile secretly at her talented exercises. Only a select few, like Mrs. Wolfstein, knew exactly what she was doing and why she was doing it, but the many were entertained, as children are, without analysing the cause of their amusement.

Two people, however, were indignant—Robin Pierce and Rupert Carey.

Robin Pierce, who had an instinct that was almost feminine in its subtlety, raged internally, and Rupert Carey, who, naturally acute, was always specially shrewd when his heart was in the game, openly showed his distaste for Miss Schley, and went about predicting her complete failure to capture the London public as an actress.

"She's done it as a woman," someone replied to him.

"Not the public, only the smart fools," returned Carey.

"The smart fools have more influence on the public every day."

Carey only snorted. He was in one of his evil moods that afternoon. He left the club in which the conversation had taken place, and, casting about for something to do, some momentary solace for his irritation and ennui, he bethought him of Sir Donald Ulford's invitation and resolved to make a call at the Albany. Sir Donald would be out, of course, but anyhow he would chance it and shoot a card.

Sir Donald's servant said he was in. Carey was glad. Here was an hour filled up.

With his usual hasty, decisive step he followed the man through a dark and Oriental-looking vestibule into a library, where Sir Donald was sitting at a bureau of teakwood, slowly writing upon a large, oblong sheet of foolscap with a very pointed pen.

He got up, looking rather startled, and held out his hand.

"I am glad to see you. I hoped you would come."

"I'm disturbing a new poem," said Carey.

Sir Donald's faded face acknowledged it.

"Sorry. I'll go."

"No, no. I have infinite leisure, and I write now merely for myself. I shall never publish anything more. The maunderings of the old are really most thoroughly at home in the waste-paper basket. Do sit down."

Carey threw himself into a deep chair and looked round. It was a room of books and Oriental china. The floor was covered with an exquisite Persian carpet, rich and delicate in colour, with one of those vague and elaborate designs that stir the imagination as it is stirred by a strange perfume in a dark bazaar where shrouded merchants sit.

"I light it with wax candles," said Sir Donald, handing Carey a cigar.

"It's a good room to think in, or to be sad in."

He struck a match on his boot.

"You like to shut out London," he continued.

"Yes. Yet I live in it."

"And hate it. So do I. London's like a black-browed brute that gets an unholy influence over you. It would turn Mark Tapley into an Ibsen man. Yet one can't get away from it."

"It holds interesting minds and interesting faces."

"Didn't Persia?"

"Lethargy dwells there and in all Eastern lands."

"You have made up your mind to spend the rest of your days in the fog?"

"No. Indeed, only to-day I acquired a Campo Santo with cypress trees, in which I intend to make a home for any dying romance that still lingers within me."

He spoke with a sort of wistful whimsicality. Carey stared hard at him.

"A Campo Santo's a place for the dead."

"Why not for the dying? Don't they need holy ground as much?"

"And where's this holy ground of yours?"

Sir Donald got up from his chair, went over to the bureau, opened a drawer, and took out of it a large photograph rolled round a piece of wood, which he handed to Carey, who swiftly spread it out on his knees.

"That is it."

"I say, Sir Donald, d'you mind my asking for a whisky-and-soda?"

"I beg your pardon."

He hastily touched a bell and ordered it. Meanwhile Carey examined the photograph.

"What do you think of it?" Sir Donald asked.

"Well—Italy obviously."

"Yes, and a conventional part of Italy."

"Maggiore?"

"No, Como."

"The playground of the honeymoon couple."

"Not where my Campo Santo is. They go to Cadenabbia, Bellagio, Villa D'Este sometimes."

"I see the fascination. But it looks haunted. You've bought it?"

"Yes. The matter was arranged to-day."

The photograph showed a large, long house, or rather two houses divided by a piazza with slender columns. In the foreground was water. Through the arches of the piazza water was also visible, a cascade falling in the black cleft of a mountain gorge dark with the night of cypresses. To the right of the house, rising from the lake, was a tall old wall overgrown with masses of creeping plants and climbing roses. Over it more cypresses looked, and at the base of it, near the house, were a flight of worn steps disappearing into the lake, and an arched doorway with an elaborately-wrought iron grille. Beneath the photograph was written, "Casa Felice."

"Casa Felice, h'm!" said Carey, with his eyes on the photograph.

"You think the name inappropriate?"

"Who knows? One can be wretched among sunbeams. One might be gay among cypresses. And Casa Felice belongs to you?"

"From to-day."

"Old—of course?"

"Yes. There is a romance connected with the house."

"What is it?"

"Long ago two guilty lovers deserted their respective mates and the brilliant world they had figured in, and fled there together."

"And quarrelled and were generally wretched there for how many months?"

"For eight years."

"The devil! Fidelity gone mad!"

"It is said that during those years the mistress never left the garden, except to plunge into the lake on moonlight nights and swim through the silver with her lover."

Carey was silent. He did not take his eyes from the photograph, which seemed to fascinate him. When the servant came in with the whisky-and-soda he started.

"Not a place to be alone in," he said.

He drank, and stared again at the photograph.

"There's something about the place that holds one even in a photograph," he added.

"One can feel the strange intrigue that made the house a hermitage. It has been a hermitage ever since."

"Ah!"

"An old Italian lady, very rich, owned it, but never lived there. She recently died, and her heir consented to sell it to me."

"Well, I should like to see it in the flesh—or the bricks and mortar. But it's not a place to be alone in," repeated Carey. "It wants a woman if ever a house did."

"What sort of woman?"

Sir Donald had sat down again on the chair opposite, and was looking with his exhausted eyes through the smoke of the cigars at Carey.

"A fair woman, a woman with a white face, a slim woman with eyes that are cords to draw men to her and bind them to her, and a voice that can sing them into the islands of the sirens."

"Are there such women in a world that has forgotten Ulysses?"

"Don't you know it?"

He rolled the photograph round the piece of wood and laid it on a table.

"I can only think of one who at all answers to your description."

"The one of whom I was thinking."

"Lady Holme?"

"Of course."

"Don't you think she would be dreadfully bored in Casa Felice?"

"Horribly, horribly. Unless—"

"Unless?"

"Who knows what? But there's very often an unless hanging about, like a man at a street corner, that—" He broke off, then added abruptly, "Invite me to Casa Felice some day."

"I do."

"When will you be going there?"

"As soon as the London season is over. Some time in August. Will you come then?"

"The house is ready for you?"

"It will be. The necessary repairs will be begun now. I have bought it furnished."

"The lovers' furniture?"

"Yes. I shall add a number of my own things, picked up on my wanderings."

"I'll come in August if you'll have me. But I'll give you the season to think whether you'll have me or whether you won't. I'm a horrible bore in a house—the lazy man who does nothing and knows a lot. Casa Felice—Casa Felice. You won't alter the name?"

"Would you advise me to?"

"I don't know. To keep it is to tempt the wrath of the gods, but I should keep it."

He poured out another whisky-and-soda and suddenly began to curse Miss Schley.

Sir Donald had spoken to her after Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch.

"She's imitating Lady Holme," said Carey.

"I cannot see the likeness," Sir Donald said. "Miss Schley seems to me uninteresting and common."

"She is."

"And Lady Holme's personality is, on the contrary; interesting and uncommon."

"Of course. Pimpernel Schley would be an outrage in that Campo Santo of yours. And yet there is a likeness, and she's accentuating it every day she lives."

"Why?"

"Ask the women why they do the cursed things they do do."

"You are a woman-hater?"

"Not I. Didn't I say just now that Casa Felice wanted a woman? But the devil generally dwells where the angel dwells—cloud and moon together. Now you want to get on with that poem."

Half London was smiling gently at the resemblance between Lady Holme and Miss Schley before the former made up her mind to ask the latter to "something." And when, moved to action by certain evidences of the Philadelphia talent which could not be misunderstood, she did make up her mind, she resolved that the "something" should be very large and by no means very intimate. Safety wanders in crowds.

She sent out cards for a reception, one of those affairs that begin about eleven, are tremendous at half past, look thin at twelve, and have faded away long before the clock strikes one.

Lord Holme hated them. On several occasions he had been known to throw etiquette to the winds and not to turn up when his wife was giving them. He always made what he considered to be a good excuse. Generally he had "gone into the country to look at a horse." As Lady Holme sent out her cards, and saw her secretary writing the words, "Miss Pimpernel Schley," on an envelope which contained one, she asked herself whether her husband would be likely to play her false this time.

"Shall you be here on the twelfth?" she asked him casually.

"Why? What's up on the twelfth?"

"I'm going to have one of those things you hate—before the Arkell House ball. I chose that night so that everyone should run away early! You won't be obliged to look at a horse in the country that particular day?"

She spoke laughingly, as if she wanted him to say no, but would not be very angry if he didn't. Lord Holme tugged his moustache and looked very serious indeed.

"Another!" he ejaculated. "We're always havin' 'em. Any music?"

"No, no, nothing. There are endless dinners that night, and Mrs. Crutchby's concert with Calve, and the ball. People will only run in and say something silly and run out again."

"Who's comin'?"

"Everybody. All the tiresome dears that have had their cards left."

Lord Holme stared at his varnished boots and looked rather like a puzzled boy at a viva voce examination.

"The worst of it is, I can't be in the country lookin' at a horse that night," he said with depression.

"Why not?"

She hastily added:

"But why should you? You ought to be here."

"I'd rather be lookin' at a horse. But I'm booked for the dinner to Rowley at the Nation Club that night. I might say the speeches were too long and I couldn't get away. Eh?"

He looked at her for support.

"You really ought to be here, Fritz," she answered.

It ended there. Lady Holme knew her husband pretty well. She fancied that the speeches at the dinner given to Sir Jacob Rowley, ex-Governor of some place she knew nothing about, would turn out to be very lengthy indeed—speeches to keep a man far from his home till after midnight.

On the evening of the twelfth Lord Holme had not arrived when the first of his wife's guests came slowly up the stairs, and Lady Holme began gently to make his excuses to all the tiresome dears who had had their cards left at forty-two Cadogan Square. There were a great many tiresome dears. The stream flowed steadily, and towards half-past eleven resembled a flood-tide.

Lady Cardington, Lady Manby, Mr. Bry, Sally Perceval had one by one appeared, and Robin Pierce's dark head was visible mounting slowly amid a throng of other heads of all shapes, sizes and tints.

Lady Holme was looking particularly well. She was dressed in black. Of course black suits everybody. It suited her even better than most people, and her gown was a triumph. She was going on to the Arkell House ball, and wore the Holme diamonds, which were superb, and which she had recently had reset. She was in perfect health, and felt unusually young and unusually defiant. As she stood at the top of the staircase, smiling, shaking hands with people, and watching Robin Pierce coming slowly nearer, she wondered a little at certain secret uneasinesses—they could scarcely be called tremors—which had recently oppressed her. How absurd of her to have been troubled, even lightly, by the impertinent proceedings of an American actress, a nobody from the States, without position, without distinction, without even a husband. How could it matter to her what such a little person—she always called Pimpernel Schley a little person in her thoughts—did or did not do? As Robin came towards her she almost—but not quite—wished that the speeches at the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had not been so long as they evidently had been, and that her husband were standing beside her, looking enormous and enormously bored.

"What a crowd!"

"Yes. We can't talk now. Are you going to Arkell House?"

Robin nodded.

"Take me in to supper there."

"May I? Thank you. I'm going with Rupert Carey."

"Really!"

At this moment Lady Holme's eyes and manner wandered. She had just caught a glimpse of Mrs. Wolfstein, a mass of jewels, and of Pimpernel Schley at the foot of the staircase, had just noticed that the latter happened to be dressed in black.

"Bye-bye!" she added.

Robin Pierce walked on into the drawing-rooms looking rather preoccupied.

Everybody came slowly up the stairs. It was impossible to do anything else. But it seemed to Lady Holme that Miss Schley walked far more slowly than the rest of the tiresome dears, with a deliberation that had a touch of insolence in it. Her straw-coloured hair was done exactly like Lady Holme's, but she wore no diamonds in it. Indeed, she had on no jewels. And this absence of jewels, and her black gown, made her skin look almost startlingly white, if possible whiter than Lady Holme's. She smiled quietly as she mounted the stairs, as if she were wrapt in a pleasant, innocent dream which no one knew anything about.

Amalia Wolfstein was certainly a splendid—a too splendid—foil to her. The Jewess was dressed in the most vivid orange colour, and was very much made up. Her large eyebrows were heavily darkened. Her lips were scarlet. Her eyes, which moved incessantly, had a lustre which suggested oil with a strong light shining on it. "Henry" followed in her wake, looking intensely nervous, and unnaturally alive and observant, as if he were searching in the crowd for a bit of gold that someone had accidentally dropped. When anyone spoke to him he replied with extreme vivacity but in the fewest possible words. He held his spare figure slightly sideways as he walked, and his bald head glistened under the electric lamps. Behind them, in the distance, was visible the yellow and sunken face of Sir Donald Ulford.

When Miss Schley gained the top of the staircase Lady Holme saw that their gowns were almost exactly alike. Hers was sewn with diamonds, but otherwise there was scarcely any difference. And she suddenly felt as if the difference made by the jewels was not altogether in her favour, as if she were one of those women who look their best when they are not wearing any ornaments. Possibly Mrs. Wolfstein made all jewellery seem vulgar for the moment. She looked like an exceedingly smart jeweller's shop rather too brilliantly illuminated; "as if she were for sale," as an old and valued friend of hers aptly murmured into the ear of someone who had known her ever since she began to give good dinners.

"Here we are! I'm chaperoning Pimpernel. But her mother arrives to-morrow," began Mrs. Wolfstein, with her strongest accent, while Miss Schley put out a limp hand to meet Lady Holme's and very slightly accentuated her smile.

"Your mother? I shall be delighted to meet her. I hope you'll bring her one day," said Lady Holme; thinking more emphatically than ever that for a woman with a complexion as perfect as hers it was a mistake to wear many jewels.

"I'll be most pleased, but mother don't go around much," replied Miss Schley.

"Does she know London?"

"She does not. She spends most of her time sitting around in Susanville, but she's bound to look after me in this great city."

Mrs. Wolfstein was by this time in violent conversation with a pale young man, who always looked as if he were on the point of fainting, but who went literally everywhere. Miss Schley glanced up into Lady Holme's eyes.

"I hoped to make the acquaintance of Lord Holme to-night," she murmured. "Folks tell me he's a most beautiful man. Isn't he anywhere around?"

She looked away into vacancy, ardently. Lady Holme felt a slight tingling sensation in her cool skin. For a moment it seemed to her as if she watched herself in caricature, distorted perhaps by a mirror with a slight flaw in it.

"My husband was obliged to dine out to-night; unfortunately. I hope he'll be here in a moment, but he may be kept, as there are to be some dreadful speeches afterwards. I can't think why elderly men always want to get up and talk nonsense about the Royal family after a heavy dinner. It's so bad for the digestion and the—ah, Sir Donald! Sweet of you to turn up. Your boy's been so unkind. I asked him to call, or he asked to call, and he's never been near me."

Miss Schley drifted away and was swallowed by the crowd. Sir Donald had arrived at the top of the stairs.

"Leo's been away in Scotland ever since he had the pleasure of meeting you. He only came back to-night."

"Then I'm not quite so hurt. He's always running about, I suppose, to kill things, like my husband."

"He does manage a good deal in that way. If you are going to the Arkell House ball you'll meet him there. He and his wife are both—"

"How did do! Oh, Charley, I never expected to see you. I thought it wasn't the thing for the 2nd to turn up at little hay parties like this. Kitty Barringlave is in the far room, dreadfully bored. Go and cheer her up. Tell her what'll win the Cup. She's pale and peaky with ignorance about Ascot this year. Both going to Arkell House, Sir Donald, did you say? Bring your son to me, won't you? But of course you're a wise man trotting off to bed."

"No. The Duke is a very old friend of mine, and so—"

"Perfect. We'll meet then. They say it's really locomotor ataxia, poor fellow I but—ah, there's Fritz!"

Sir Donald looked at her with a sudden inquiring shrewdness, that lit up his faded eyes and made them for a moment almost young. He had caught a sound of vexation in her voice, which reminded him oddly of the sound in her singing voice when Miss Filberte was making a fiasco of the accompaniment. Lord Holme was visible and audible in the hall. His immense form towered above his guests, and his tremendous bass voice dominated the hum of conversation round him. Lady Holme could see from where she stood that he was in a jovial and audacious mood. The dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley had evidently been well cooked and gay. Fritz had the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms. They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air, which always suggested the old nursery game, "Here I am on Tom Tiddler's ground, picking up gold and silver." Lady Manby was laughing in a corner with an archdeacon who looked like a guardsman got up in fancy dress. Mr. Bry, his eyeglass fixed in his left eye, came towards the staircase, moving delicately like Agag, and occasionally dropping a cold or sarcastic word to an acquaintance. He reached Lady Holme when Lord Holme was half-way up the stairs, and at once saw him.

"A giant refreshed with wine," he observed, dropping his eyeglass.

It was such a perfect description of Lord Holme in his present condition that two or three people who were standing with Lady Holme smiled, looking down the staircase. Lady Holme did not smile. She continued chattering, but her face wore a discontented expression. Mr. Bry noticed it. There were very few things he did not notice, although he claimed to be the most short-sighted man in London.

"Why is your husband so dutiful to-night?" he murmured to his hostess. "I thought he always had to go into the country to look at a gee-gee on these occasions."

"He had to be in town for the dinner to Sir Jacob Rowley. I begged him to come back in—How did do! How did do! Yes, very. Mr. Raleigh, do tell the opera people not to put on Romeo too often this season. Of course Melba's splendid in it, and all that, but still—"

Mr. Bry fixed his eyeglass again, and began to smile gently like an evil-minded baby. Lord Holme's brown face was full in view, grinning. His eyes were looking about with unusual vivacity.

"How early you are, Fritz! Good boy. I want you to look after—"

"I say, Vi, why didn't you tell me?"

Mr. Bry, letting his eyeglass fall, looked abstracted and lent an attentive ear. If he were not playing prompter to social comedies he generally stood in the wings, watching and listening to them with a cold amusement that was seldom devoid of a spice of venom.

"Tell you what, Fritz?"

"That Miss Schley was comin' to-night. Everyone's talking about her. I sat next Laycock at dinner and he was ravin'. Told me she was to be here and I didn't know it. Rather ridiculous, you know. Where is she?"

"Somewhere in the rooms."

"What's she like?"

"Oh!—I don't know. She's in black. Go and look for her."

Lord Holme strode on. As he passed Mr. Bry he said:

"I say, Bry, d'you know Miss Pimpernel Schley?"

"Naturally."

"Come with me, there's a good chap, and—what's she like?"

As they went on into the drawing-rooms Mr. Bry dropped out:

"Some people say she's like Lady Holme."

"Like Vi! Is she? Laycock's been simply ravin'—simply ravin'—and Laycock's not a feller to—where is she?

"We shall come to her. So there was no gee-gee to look at in the country to-night?"

Lord Holme burst into a roar of laughter.

"There's the vestal tending her lamp," said Mr. Bry a moment later.

"The what up to what?"

"Miss Pimpernel Schley keeping the fire of adoration carefully alight."

"Where?"

"There."

"Oh, I see! Jove, what a skin, though! Eh! Isn't it? She is deuced like Vi at a distance. Vi looks up just like that when she's singin'. Doesn't she, though? Eh?"

He went on towards her.

Mr. Bry followed him, murmuring.

"The giant refreshed with wine. No gee-gee to-night. No gee-gee."



CHAPTER VIII

"THE brougham is at the door, my lady."

"Tell his lordship."

The butler went out, and Lady Holme's maid put a long black cloak carefully over her mistress's shoulders. While she did this Lady Holme stood quite still gazing into vacancy. They were in the now deserted yellow drawing-room, which was still brilliantly lit, and full of the already weary-looking flowers which had been arranged for the reception. The last guest had gone and the carriage was waiting to take the Holmes to Arkell House.

The maid did something to the diamonds in Lady Holme's hair with deft fingers, and the light touch seemed to wake Lady Holme from a reverie. She went to a mirror and looked into it steadily. The maid stood behind. After a moment Lady Holme lifted her hand suddenly to her head, as if she were going to take off her tiara. The maid could not repress a slight movement of startled astonishment. Lady Holme saw it in the glass, dropped her hand, and said:

"C'est tout, Josephine. Vous pouvez vous en aller."

"Merci, miladi."

She went out quietly.

Two or three minutes passed. Then Lord Holme's deep bass voice was audible, humming vigorously:

"Ina, Ina, oh, you should have seen her! Seen her with her eyes cast down. She looked upon the floor, And all the Johnnies swore That Ina, Ina—oh, you should have seen her!— That Ina was the chic-est girl in town."

Lady Holme frowned.

"Fritz!" she called rather sharply.

Lord Holme appeared with a coat thrown over his arm and a hat in his hand. His brown face was beaming with self-satisfaction.

"Well, old girl, ready? What's up now?"

"I wish you wouldn't sing those horrible music-hall songs. You know I hate them."

"Music-hall! I like that. Why, it's the best thing in The Chick from the Army and Navy at the Blue Theatre."

"It's disgustingly vulgar."

"What next? Why, I saw the Lord Chan—"

"I daresay you did. Vulgarity will appeal to the Saints of Heaven next season if things go on as they're going now. Come along."

She went out of the room, walking more quickly than she usually walked, and holding herself very upright. Lord Holme followed, forming the words of his favourite song with his lips, and screwing up his eyes as if he were looking at an improper peepshow. When they were in the electric brougham, which spun along with scarcely any noise, he began:

"I say, Vi, how long've you known Miss Schley?"

"I don't know. Some weeks."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I did. I said I had met her at Mrs. Wolfstein's lunch."

"No, but why didn't you tell me how like you she was?"

There was complete silence in the brougham for a minute. Then Lady Holme said:

"I had no idea she was like me."

"Then you're blind, old girl. She's like you if you'd been a chorus-girl and known a lot of things you don't know."

"Really. Perhaps she has been a chorus-girl."

"I'll bet she has, whether she says so or not."

He gave a deep chuckle. Lady Holme's gown rustled as she leaned back in her corner.

"And she's goin' to Arkell House. Americans are the very devil for gettin' on. Laycock was tellin' me to-night that—"

"I don't wish to hear Mr. Laycock's stories, Fritz. They don't amuse me."

"Well, p'r'aps they're hardly the thing for you, Vi. But they're deuced amusin' for all that."

He chuckled again. Lady Holme felt an intense desire to commit some act of physical violence. She shut her eyes. In a minute she heard her husband once more beginning to hum the refrain about Ina. How utterly careless he was of her desires and requests. There was something animal in his forgetfulness and indifference. She had loved the animal in him. She did love it. Something deep down in her nature answered eagerly to its call. But at moments she hated it almost with fury. She hated it now and longed to use the whip, as the tamer in a menagerie uses it when one of his beasts shows its teeth, or sulkily refuses to perform one of its tricks.

Lord Holme went on calmly humming till the brougham stopped in the long line of carriages that stretched away into the night from the great portico of Arkell House.

People were already going in to supper when the Holmes arrived. The Duke, upon whom a painful malady was beginning to creep, was bravely welcoming his innumerable guests. He found it already impossible to go unaided up and down stairs, and sat in a large armchair close to the ball-room, with one of his pretty daughters near him, talking brightly, and occasionally stealing wistful glances at the dancers, who were visible through a high archway to his left. He was a thin, middle-aged man, with a curious, transparent look in his face—something crystalline that was nearly beautiful.

The Duchess was swarthy and masterful, very intelligent and grande dame. Vivacity was easy to her. People said she had been a good hostess in her cradle, and that she had presided over the ceremony of her own baptism in a most autocratic and successful manner. It was quite likely.

After a word with the Duke, Lady Holme went slowly towards the ballroom with her husband. She did not mean to dance, and began to refuse the requests of would-be partners with charming protestations of fatigue. Lord Holme was scanning the ballroom with his big brown eyes.

"Are you going to dance, Fritz?" asked Lady Holme, nodding to Robin Pierce, whom she had just seen standing at a little distance with Rupert Carey.

The latter had not seen her yet, but as Robin returned her nod he looked hastily round.

"Yes, I promised Miss Schley to struggle through a waltz with her. Wonder if she's dancin'?"

Lady Holme bowed, a little ostentatiously, to Rupert Carey. Her husband saw it and began at once to look pugilistic. He could not say anything, for at this moment two or three men strolled up to speak to Lady Holme. While she was talking to them, Pimpernel Schley came in sight waltzing with Mr. Laycock, one of those abnormally thin, narrow-featured, smart men, with bold, inexpressive ayes, in whom London abounds.

Lord Holme's under-jaw resumed its natural position, and he walked away and was lost in the crowd, following the two dancers.

"Take me in to supper, Robin. I'm tired."

"This way. I thought you were never coming."

"People stayed so late. I can't think why. I'm sure it was dreadfully dull and foolish. How odd Mr. Carey's looking! When I bowed to him just now he didn't return it, but only stared at me as if I were a stranger."

Robin Pierce made no rejoinder. They descended the great staircase and went towards the picture-gallery.

"Find a corner where we can really talk."

"Yes, yes."

He spoke eagerly.

"Here—this is perfect."

They sat down at a table for two that was placed in an angle of the great room. Upon the walls above them looked down a Murillo and a Velasquez. Lady Holme was under the Murillo, which represented three Spanish street boys playing a game in the dust with pieces of money.

"A table for two," said Robin Pierce. "I have always said that the Duchess understands the art of entertaining better than anyone in London, except you—when you choose."

"To-night I really couldn't choose. Later on, I'm going to give two or three concerts. Is anything the matter with Mr. Carey?"

"Do you think so?"

"Well, I hope it isn't true what people are saying."

"What are they saying?"

"That's he's not very judicious in one way."

A footman poured champagne into her glass. Robin Pierce touched the glass.

"That way?"

"Yes. It would be too sad."

"Let us hope it isn't true, then."

"You know him well. Is it true?"

"Would you care if it was?"

He looked at her earnestly.

"Yes. I like Mr. Carey."

There was a rather unusual sound of sincerity in her voice.

"And what is it that you like in him?"

"Oh, I don't know. He talks shocking nonsense, of course, and is down on people and things. And he's absurdly unsophisticated at moments, though he knows the world so well. He's not like you—not a diplomat. But I believe if he had a chance he might do something great."

Robin felt as if the hidden woman had suddenly begun to speak. Why did she speak about Rupert Carey?

"Do you like a man to do something great?" he said.

"Oh, yes. All women do."

"But I perpetually hear you laughing at the big people—the Premiers, the Chancellors, the Archbishops, the Generals of the world."

"Because I've always known them. And really they are so often quite absurd and tiresome."

"And—Rupert Carey?"

"Oh, he's nothing at all, poor fellow! Still there's something in his face that makes me think he could do an extraordinary thing if he had the chance. I saw it there to-night when he didn't bow to me. There's Sir Donald's son. And what a dreadful-looking woman just behind him."

Leo Ulford was coming down the gallery with a gaunt, aristocratic, harsh-featured girl. Behind him walked Mr. Bry, conducting a very young old woman, immensely smart, immensely vivacious, and immensely pink, who moved with an unnecessary alertness that was birdlike, and turned her head about sharply on a long, thin neck decorated with a large diamond dog-collar. Slung at her side there was a tiny jewelled tube.

"That's Mrs. Leo."

"She must be over sixty."

"She is."

The quartet sat down at the next table. Leo Ulford did not see Lady Holme at once. When he caught sight of her, he got up, came to her, stood over her and pressed her hand.

"Been away," he explained. "Only back to-night."

"I've been complaining to your father about you."

A slow smile overspread his chubby face.

"May I see you again after supper?"

"If you can find me."

"I can always manage to find what I want," he returned, still smiling.

When he had gone back to his table Robin Pierce said:

"How insolent Englishmen are allowed to be in Society! It always strikes me after I've been a long time abroad. Doesn't anybody mind it?"

"Do you mean that you consider Mr. Ulford insolent?"

"In manner. Yes, I do."

"Well, I think there's something like Fritz about him."

Robin Pierce could not tell from the way this was said what would be a safe remark to make. He therefore changed the subject.

"Do you know what Sir Donald's been doing?" he said.

"No. What?"

"Buying a Campo Santo."

"A Campo Santo! Is he going to bury himself, then? What do you mean, Robin?"

"He called it a Campo Santo to Carey. It's really a wonderful house in Italy, on Como. Casa Felice is the name of it. I know it well."

"Casa Felice. How delicious! But is it the place for Sir Donald?"

"Why not?"

"For an old, tired man. Casa Felice. Won't the name seem an irony to him when he's there?"

"You think an old man can't be happy anywhere?"

"I can't imagine being happy old."

"Why not?"

"Oh!"—she lowered her voice—"if you want to know, look at Mrs. Ulford."

"Your husk theory again. A question of looks. But you will grow old gracefully—some day in the far future."

"I don't think I shall grow old at all."

"Then—?"

"I think I shall die before that comes—say at forty-five. I couldn't live with wrinkles all over my face. No, Robin, I couldn't. And—look at Mrs. Ulford!—perhaps an ear-trumpet set with opals."

"What do the wrinkles matter? But some day you'll find I'm right. You'll tell me so. You'll acknowledge that your charm comes from within, and has survived the mutilation of the husk."

"Mutilation! What a hideous sound that word has. Why don't all mutilated people commit suicide at once? I should. Is Sir Donald going to live in his happy house?"

"Naturally. He'll be there this August. He's invited Rupert Carey to stay there with him."

"And you?"

"Not yet."

"I suppose he will. Everybody always asks you everywhere. Diplomacy is so universally—"

She broke off. Far away, at the end of the gallery, she had caught sight of Miss Schley coming in with her husband. They sat down at a table near the door. Robin Pierce followed her eyes and understood her silence.

"Are you going on the first?" he asked.

"What to?"

"Miss Schley's first night."

"Is it on the first? I didn't know. We can't. We're dining at Brayley House that evening."

"What a pity!" he said, with a light touch of half playful malice. "You would have seen her as she really is—from all accounts."

"And what is Miss Schley really?"

"The secret enemy of censors."

"Oh!"

"You dislike her. Why?"

"I don't dislike her at all."

"Do you like her?"

"No. I like very few women. I don't understand them."

"At any rate you understand—say Miss Schley—better than a man would."

"Oh—a man!"

"I believe all women think all men fools."

Lady Holme laughed, not very gaily.

"Don't they?" he insisted.

"In certain ways, in certain relations of life, I suppose most men are—rather short-sighted."

"Like Mr. Bry."

"Mr. Bry is the least short-sighted man I know. That's why he always wears an eyeglass."

"To create an illusion?"

"Who knows?"

She looked down the long room. Between the heads of innumerable men and women she could see Miss Schley. Her husband was hidden. She would have preferred to see him. Miss Schley's head was by no means expressive of the naked truth. It merely looked cool, self-possessed, and—so Lady Holme said to herself—extremely American. What she meant by that she could, perhaps, hardly have explained.

"Do you admire Miss Schley's appearance?"

Robin Pierce spoke again with a touch of humorous malice. He knew Lady Holme so well that he had no objection to seem wanting in tact to her when he had a secret end to gain. She looked at him sharply; leaning forward over the table and opening her eyes very wide.

"Why are you forgetting your manners to-night and bombarding me with questions?"

"The usual reason—devouring curiosity."

She hesitated, looking at him. Then suddenly her face changed. Something, some imp of adorable frankness, peeped out of it at him, and her whole body seemed confiding.

"Miss Schley is going about London imitating me. Now, isn't that true? Isn't she?"

"I believe she is. Damned impertinence!"

He muttered the last words under his breath.

"How can I admire her?"

There was something in the way she said that which touched him. He leaned forward to her.

"Why not punish her for it?"

"How?"

"Reveal what she can't imitate."

"What's that?"

"All you hide and I divine."

"Go on."

"She mimics the husk. She couldn't mimic the kernel."

"Ice, my lady?"

Lady Holme started. Till the footman spoke she had not quite realised how deeply interested she was in the conversation. She helped herself to some ice.

"You can go on, Mr. Pierce," she said when the man had gone.

"But you understand."

She shook her head, smiling. Her body still looked soft and attractive, and deliciously feminine.

"Miss Schley happens to have some vague resemblance to you in height and colouring. She is a clever mimic. She used to be a professional mimic."

"Really!"

"That was how she first became known."

"In America?"

"Yes."

"Why should she imitate me?"

"Have you been nice to her?"

"I don't know. Yes. Nice enough."

Robin shook his head.

"You think she dislikes me then?"

"Do women want definite reasons for half the things they do? Miss Schley may not say to herself that she dislikes you, any more than you say to yourself that you dislike her. Nevertheless—"

"We should never get on. No."

"Consider yourselves enemies—for no reasons, or secret woman's reasons. It's safer."

Lady Holme looked down the gallery again. Miss Schley's fair head was bending forward to some invisible person.

"And the mimicry?" she asked, turning again to Robin.

"Can only be applied to mannerisms, to the ninety-ninth part, the inconsiderable fraction of your charm. Miss Schley could never imitate the hidden woman, the woman who sings, the woman who laughs at, denies herself when she is not singing."

"But no one cares for her—if she exists."

There was a hint of secret bitterness in her voice when she said that.

"Give her a chance—and find out. But you know already that numbers do."

He tried to look into her eyes, but she avoided his gaze and got up.

"Take me back to the ballroom."

"You are going to dance?"

"I want to see who's here."

As they passed the next table Lady Holme nodded to Leo Ulford. He bowed in return and indicated that he was following almost immediately. Mrs. Ulford put down her ear-trumpet, turned her head sharply, and looked at Lady Holme sideways, fluttering her pink eyelids.

"How exactly like a bird she is," murmured Lady Holme.

"Exactly—moulting."

Lady Holme meant as she walked down the gallery; to stop and speak a few gay words to Miss Schley and her husband, but when she drew near to their table Lord Holme was holding forth with such unusual volubility, and Miss Schley was listening with such profound attention, that it did not seem worth while, and she went quietly on, thinking they did not see her. Lord Holme did not. But the American smiled faintly as Lady Holme and Robin disappeared into the hall. Then she said, in reply to her animated companion:

"I'm sure if I am like Lady Holme I ought to say Te Deum and think myself a lucky girl. I ought, indeed."