Slim, ethereally transparent, her white
shoulders rising above a dress of misty black, a carmine flush staining
the soft oval of her cheeks, Eve Dempster appeared more like a beautiful
wraith than a woman of flesh and blood. The years had brought to her
none of the ordinary signs of age; as though loath to mar so exquisite a
creature, they had passed by, leaving behind nothing but an air of
additional transparence and fragility to mark their course. Rupert, on
the contrary, looked more than his age. His face was lined as by a
ceaseless anxiety, but in his eyes there was a great content.

Eve Dempster's long, misty train floated so far behind as to necessitate
a gap in the descent of the guests. The gap, and the isolated position
which she occupied as the first of the guests to descend in single file,
threw into greater prominence the stolid, ungainly figure of Mrs
Francis Manning, clad in a satin gown of a violent shade of blue. Her
light hair was elaborately waved and dressed in the latest eccentricity
of the day; tight white kid gloves came to an end half-way up her
reddened arms. She looked what she was, a middle-class matron of the
suburbs, divided between pride and embarrassment in her present
position. Her husband followed close behind, large, heavily built, with
clean-shaven face, patient, saddened, strikingly controlled. Mrs
Ingram, watching from the hall beneath, felt a smarting of the eyes as
she looked at that face, and remembered the torpid complacence of the
days that were gone!

The next couple were in appearance perhaps the most normal of any. A
man too alert and supple to be yet classed as middle-aged, a pretty,
soft-eyed woman, with humorous lips, and a graceful head poised at an
angle which suggested an agreeable touch of coquetry; a woman whose
spirit remained young; a woman who retained the power to charm, though
the dreaded forty hovered but a few years ahead.

And then, last of all, sweeping downwards with the indefinable air of
those accustomed to high places, came the guests of honour, the Rt.
Hon. Hereward Lowther, and Lilith, his wife. The Minister was smiling,
and the smile showed him at his best. A physiognomist would have read
in his face a curious mingling of weakness and strength but the old
shadow was replaced by a radiant complacence, and there was a touch of
obvious though perfectly good-natured condescension in his bearing as he
surveyed the group in the hall. He was r