ith a laugh.

'Now, be nice to Paul. He's dying to talk to you about his book. Let us
go and join them in the garden. See if you can stand before my yellow
blaze and not feel melted.'

The elder woman and the younger went down the terrace through a little
copse to her ladyship's own area of experimentation. A gate of old
Florentine scrolled iron opened suddenly upon a blaze of yellow in all
the shades from the orange velvet of the wallflower through the shaded
saffron of azalias and a dozen tints of tulip to the palest primrose and
jonquil.

The others were walking round the enclosing grass paths that served as
broad green border, and Filey, who had been in all sorts of queer
places, said the yellow garden made him think of a Mexican serape--'one
of those silk scarves, you know--native weaving made out of the
pineapple fibre.'

But Vida only said, 'Yes. It's a good scheme of colour.'

She sat on the rustic seat while Lady John explained to Lord Borrodaile,
whose gardens were renowned, how she and Simonson treated this and that
plant to get so fine a result. Filey had lost no time in finding a place
for himself by Miss Levering, while Hermione trailed dutifully round the
garden with the others. Occasionally she looked over her shoulder at the
two on the seat by the sunken wall--Vida leaning back in the corner
motionless, absolutely inexpressive; Filey's eager face bent forward. He
was moving his hands in a way he had learned abroad.

'You were rather annoyed with me,' he was saying. 'I saw that.'

The lady did not deny the imputation.

'But you oughtn't to be. Because you see it's only because my ideal of
woman is'--again that motion of the hands--'_what_ it is, that when I
see her stepping down from her pedestal I----' the hands indicated
consternation, followed hard by cataclysmic ruin. 'Of course, lots of
men don't care. I _do_. I care enormously, and so you must forgive me.
Won't you?' He bent nearer.

'Oh, _I've_ nothing to forgive.'

'I know without your telling me, I feel instinctively, _you_ more than
most people--you'd simply loathe the sort of thing we were talking about
at tea--women yelling and fighting men----'

'Yes--yes, don't go all over that.'

'No, of course I won't,' he said soothingly. 'I can feel it to my very
spine, how you shrink from such horrors.'

Miss Levering, raising her eyes suddenly, caught the look Hermione cast
backward as Lady John halted her party a moment near the pansy