that her lips should not droop.

Davidge heard the butler announce:

"Lady Clifton-Wyatt and General Sir Hector Havendish."

Davidge wondered which of the two names could have so terrified
Marie Louise. Naturally he supposed that it was the man's. He turned
to study the officer in his British uniform. He saw a tall,
loose-jointed, jovial man of horsy look and carriage, and no hint of
mystery--one would say an intolerance of mystery.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt was equally amiable. She laughed and wrung the
hands of Mrs. Prothero. They were like two school-girls met in another
century.

Davidge noted that Marie Louise turned her back and listened with
extraordinary interest to Major Widdicombe's old story about an
Irishman who did or said something or other. Davidge heard Mrs.
Prothero say to Lady Clifton-Wyatt, with all the joy in the world:

"Who do you suppose is here but our Marie Louise?"

"Our Marie Louise?" Lady Clifton-Wyatt echoed, with a slight chill.

"Yes, Marie Louise Webling. It was at her house that I met you. Where
has the child got to? There she is."

Without raising her voice she focused it between Marie Louise's
shoulder-blades.

"Marie Louise, my dear!"

Marie Louise turned and came up like a wax image on casters pulled
forward by an invisible window-dresser. Lady Clifton-Wyatt's limber
attitude grew erect, deadly, ominously hostile. She looked as if she
would turn Marie Louise to stone with a Medusa glare, but she
evidently felt that she had no right to commit petrifaction in Mrs.
Prothero's home; so she bowed and murmured:

"Ah, yis! How are you?"

To Davidge's amazement, Miss Webling, instead of meeting the rebuff
in kind, wavered before it and bowed almost gratefully. Then, to
Davidge's confusion, Lady Clifton-Wyatt marched on him with a gush of
cordiality as if she had been looking for him around the Seven Seas.
She remembered him, called him by name and told him that she had seen
his pickchah in one of the papahs, as one of the creatahs of the new
fleet.

Mrs. Prothero was stunned for a moment by the scene, but she had
passed through so many women's wars that she had learned to
ignore them even when--especially when--her drawing-room was the
battleground.

Her mind was drawn from the incident by the materialization of the
butler.

Lady Clifton-Wyatt, noting that the tide was setting toward the
dining-room and that absent-minded Sir Hector was floating along the
current at the elb