coming unclad into the street, and drew her
scarf across her breast. But she found herself to be quite alone in
the drawing-room, and before she had time to be bewildered at her long
desertion, a letter was handed her with a few murmured words by a
footman. It perhaps served her right, she reflected, for so blandly
coming into a house during a state of domestic upheaval, that she
should turn out to be not alone the only guest, but without host or
friend! The letter told her, as gently as it could without the
satisfaction of any explanation, that both Bulstrode and the Duke of
Westboro' were unavoidably absent. She turned the letter over with
keen disappointment. Her dress, her beauty which the drive from
Penhaven and the afternoon's happiness had heightened to a point that
she might be pardoned for seeing, was then all for nothing! On what
extravagant bent could the two men have gone?

"Both of them," she soliloquized with a shrug, "off on a hunt, I dare
say, after a fool of a woman who doesn't know enough to stop at home."

Before she could further lash at her absent hostess, she found herself
a few seconds later taking the scarcely palpable arm of the rector,
whom the Duke, in a moment of abstraction, had asked to the
Christmas-tree and whom he had subsequently forgotten to put off. The
rector alone, of all the expected, turned up, his smile vacuous and his
appetite in order. At the table laid for four, and great enough for
forty, the clergyman and the lady faced each other. Mrs. Falconer
smiled kindly, for as her friend had told the Duchess on the same
afternoon, she was kind; and if she resented the apology for a man her
slender _vis-a-vis_ presented, she did not show her scorn; she smiled
kindly at him. His cloth and habit, and cut even, wore the air of
disapproval. Her jewels, the bare splendor of her neck and arms,
seemed out of place, and yet she could not but be perfectly sure that
even the dull eyes of her _vis-a-vis_ not alone reflected, but
confirmed, how lovely she was.

The reverend gentleman was new to Glouceshire, but it turned out that
he already knew its hearsays and its _on dits_ and he knew when she
asked him, something of the country and The Dials. It may have been
that the bright aspect of the lady, her light mockery--for as she would
she could not help falling into them even with this half-human
creature--wickedly drew him on, gave the man license as he thought, to
descend to scand