nchemain (magnificent in purple velvet, with diamonds round
her throat and in her hair) didn't seem interested.

"Do you know," she said, "I made yesterday one of the most ridiculous
blunders of my life. It's been preying upon my mind ever since. I
generally have pretty trustworthy perceptions, and perhaps this is a
symptom of failing powers. I told myself positively that you were an
Eton and Balliol man. It never occurred to me till I was halfway home
that, as a Papist, you'd be nothing of the sort."

"No," said John; "I'm afraid I'm Edgbaston and Paris. The way her hair
grows low about her brow, and swoops upwards and backwards in a sort of
tidal wave, and breaks loose in little curling tendrils,--it's
absolutely lyrical. And the smile at the bottom of her eyes is exactly
like silent music. And her mouth is a couplet in praise of love, with
two red lips for rhymes. And her chin is a perfect epithalamium of a
chin. And then her figure! And then her lilac frock! Oh, it's a
thousand, thousand pities that painting should he a forgotten art."

"What, the same lilac frock?" said Lady Blanchemain, absently. "Yet you
certainly have the Eton voice," she mused. "And if I don't pay you the
doubtful compliment of saying that you have the Balliol manner, you have
at least a kind of subtilized reminiscence of it."

"I must keep a guard upon myself," said John. "She's visiting an
Austrian woman who lives in a remote wing of the castle,--the pavilion
beyond the clock, in fact,--an Austrian woman of the exhilarating name
of Brandi."

"I'm rather in luck for my dinner to-night," said Lady Blanchemain.
"I've got Agnes Scope, the niece of the Duke of Wexmouth. She arrived
here this morning with her aunt, Lady Louisa. Of course I'm putting you
next to her. As, besides being an extremely nice girl and an heiress,
she's an ardent pervert to Romanism,--well, a word to the wise."

"Yes, I know her," said John. "We don't get on a bit. She moves on far
too high a plane for a groundling like me. She's intellectual and
earnest, and my ignorance and light-mindedness wound her to the quick.
She'll end, as I've told her to her face, by writing books,--serious
novels, probably,--which she'll illuminate with beautiful irrelevant
quotations from Browning and Cardinal Newman."

"Bother," said Lady Blanchemain. "You're perverse."

"Besides," said John, "she's engaged."

"Engaged--?" faltered Lady Blanchemain.

"Yes--to an intellectual and earn