to refrain from the thought that his affability
was largely the outcome of entire self-satisfaction; for as he posed in
the full light of the window, there was that about his attitude and
expression which seemed to invite and defy the most searching
inspection. Nor did his eyes smile with true kindliness, but rather with
the conscious triumph of the attractive debutante.

Mrs. Delarayne quietly noticed all these familiar traits in her friend,
and responded in the expected manner with one or two idle compliments
that afforded him infinite satisfaction.

"No, sit here beside me," she whispered, as if every effort to speak
might prove too much for her.

Sir Joseph did as he was bid, lingered tenderly over the handshake, and
gazed with strained sympathy into his companion's healthy face.

"Younger than ever!" he exclaimed, "but not very well I fear."

He was accustomed to Mrs. Delarayne's occasional affectation of
valetudinarian peevishness, alleged ill-health as a fact. As a rule it
was the prelude to the request for a favour on a grand scale, and being
a man of very great wealth, and therefore somewhat tight-fisted, he was
always rendered unusually solemn by his friend's fits of indisposition.

They chatted idly for a while; Mrs. Delarayne gradually receding from
the position of one on the verge of a dangerous malady, to that of a
person merely threatened with a serious breakdown if her worries were
not immediately made to cease.

It was a strange relationship that united these two people. Although Sir
Joseph was not more than five years the lady's senior, she always
treated him as if he belonged to a previous geological period; and he,
chivalrously shouldering the burden of aeons, had acquired the courteous
habit of opening all his anecdotal pronouncements with such words as:
"You would not remember old so-and-so," or "You cannot be expected to
remember the days when";--a formality which, while it delighted Mrs.
Delarayne, convinced her more and more that although Sir Joseph might
make an excellent ancestor, it would have been an indignity for a woman
of her years to accept him as a lover.

Sir Joseph had already been married once, and it had been the mistake
of his life. Before he could have had the shadow of a suspicion that he
was even to be an immensely wealthy man, he had, out of sentiment, taken
a woman of his own class whom he had found somewhere in the Midlands.
With her decease Sir Joseph, who was rapid