ll the Marcia of his imagination; the
queenly creature who had infatuated him when the first Avice was
despised and her successors unknown. It was this old idea which, in his
revolt from beauty, had led to his regret at her assumed handsomeness.
He began wondering now how much remained of that presentation after
forty years.

'Why don't you ever let me see you, Marcia?' he asked.

'O, I don't know. You mean without my bonnet? You have never asked me
to, and I am obliged to wrap up my face with this wool veil because I
suffer so from aches in these cold winter winds, though a thick veil is
awkward for any one whose sight is not so good as it was.'

The impregnable Marcia's sight not so good as it was, and her face
in the aching stage of life: these simple things came as sermons to
Jocelyn.

'But certainly I will gratify your curiosity,' she resumed
good-naturedly. 'It is really a compliment that you should still take
that sort of interest in me.'

She had moved round from the dark side of the room to the lamp--for the
daylight had gone--and she now suddenly took off the bonnet, veil
and all. She stood revealed to his eyes as remarkably good-looking,
considering the lapse of years.

'I am--vexed!' he said, turning his head aside impatiently. 'You are
fair and five-and-thirty--not a day more. You still suggest beauty. YOU
won't do as a chastisement, Marcia!'

'Ah, but I may! To think that you know woman no better after all this
time!'

'How?'

'To be so easily deceived. Think: it is lamplight; and your sight is
weak at present; and... Well, I have no reason for being anything but
candid now, God knows! So I will tell you.... My husband was younger
than myself; and he had an absurd wish to make people think he had
married a young and fresh-looking woman. To fall in with his vanity I
tried to look it. We were often in Paris, and I became as skilled in
beautifying artifices as any passee wife of the Faubourg St. Germain.
Since his death I have kept up the practice, partly because the vice is
almost ineradicable, and partly because I found that it helped me
with men in bringing up his boy on small means. At this moment I
am frightfully made up. But I can cure that. I'll come in to-morrow
morning, if it is bright, just as I really am; you'll find that Time has
not disappointed you. Remember I am as old as yourself; and I look it.'

The morrow came, and with it Marcia, quite early, as she had promised.
It happened