to the last moment
to be able to come down as usual."

"Has Lady Henry all she wants, Dixon? Have you taken her the evening
papers?"

"Oh yes, miss. But if you go in to her much her ladyship says you're
disturbing her; and if you don't go, why, of course, everybody's
neglecting her."

"Do you think I may go and say good-night to her, Dixon?"

The maid hesitated.

"I'll ask her, miss--I'll certainly ask her."

The door closed, and Julie was left alone in the great drawing-room of
the Bruton Street house. It had been prepared as usual for the
Wednesday--evening party. The flowers were fresh; the chairs had been
arranged as Lady Henry liked to have them; the parquet floors shone
under the electric light; the Gainsboroughs seemed to look down from the
walls with a gay and friendly expectancy.

For herself, Julie had just finished her solitary dinner, still buoyed
up while she was eating it by the hope that Lady Henry would be able to
come down. The bitter winds of the two previous days, however, had much
aggravated her chronic rheumatism. She was certainly ill and suffering;
but Julie had known her make such heroic efforts before this to keep her
Wednesdays going that not till Dixon appeared with her verdict did she
give up hope.

So everybody would be turned away. Julie paced the drawing-room a
solitary figure amid its lights and flowers--solitary and dejected. In a
couple of hours' time all her particular friends would come to the door,
and it would be shut against them. "Of course, expect me to-night," had
been the concluding words of her letter of the morning. Several people
also had announced themselves for this evening whom it was extremely
desirable she should see. A certain eminent colonel, professor at the
Staff College, was being freely named in the papers for the Mokembe
mission. Never was it more necessary for her to keep all the threads of
her influence in good working order. And these Wednesday evenings
offered her the occasions when she was most successful, most at her
ease--especially whenever Lady Henry was not well enough to leave the
comparatively limited sphere of the back drawing-room.

Moreover, the gatherings themselves ministered to a veritable craving in
Julie Le Breton--the craving for society and conversation. She shared it
with Lady Henry, but in her it was even more deeply rooted. Lady Henry
had ten talents in the Scriptural sense--money, rank, all sorts of
inherited bonds and assoc