. Have you seen Evelyn?"

"No, not since that dinner at the Van Cortlandts'."

"Huh! for myself, I should be pleased to see you any time, Mr. Burnett.
Mrs. Mavick hasn't felt like seeing anybody lately. But I'll see, I'll
see."

The two men rose and shook hands, as men shake hands when they have an
understanding.

"I'm glad you are doing well," Mr. Mavick added; "your life is before
you, mine is behind me; that makes a heap of difference."

Within a few days Philip received a note from Mrs. Mavick--not an
effusive note, not an explanatory note, not an apologetic note, simply
a note as if nothing unusual had happened--if Mr. Burnett had leisure,
would he drop in at five o'clock in Irving Place for a cup of tea?

Not one minute by his watch after the hour named, Philip rang the bell
and was shown into a little parlor at the front. There was only
one person in the room, a lady in exquisite toilet, who rose rather
languidly to meet him, exactly as if the visitor were accustomed to drop
in to tea at that hour.

Philip hesitated a moment near the door, embarrassed by a mortifying
recollection of his last interview with Mrs. Mavick, and in that moment
he saw her face. Heavens, what a change! And yet it was a smiling face.

There is a portrait of Carmen by a foreign artist, who was years ago
the temporary fashion in New York, painted the year after her second
marriage and her return from Rome, which excited much comment at the
time. Philip had seen it in more than one portrait exhibition.

Its technical excellence was considerable. The artist had evidently
intended to represent a woman piquant and fascinating, if not strictly
beautiful. Many persons said it was lovely. Other critics said that,
whether the artist intended it or not, he had revealed the real
character of the subject. There was something sinister in its beauty.
One artist, who was out of fashion as an idealist, said, of course
privately, that the more he looked at it the more hideous it became to
him--like one of Blake's objective portraits of a "soul"--the naked
soul of an evil woman showing through the mask of all her feminine
fascinations--the possible hell, so he put it, under a woman's charm.

It was this in the portrait that Philip saw in the face smiling a
welcome--like an old, sweetly smiling Lalage--from which had passed away
youth and the sustaining consciousness of wealth and of a place in the
great world. The smile was no longer sweet, thoug