my fate," I
said. "I should be too self-conscious if you were with me. Probably I
should laugh in her face, or do something dreadful."

"Very well," Lady Kilmarny agreed. "Perhaps you're right. Say that I
sent you, and that, though you've never been with me, friends of mine
know all about you. You might tell her that you were to have travelled
with the Princess Boriskoff. That will impress her. She would kiss the
boot of a Princess. Afterward, come up and tell me how you got on with
'Her Ladyship.'"

I was stupid to be nervous, and told myself so; but as I knocked at the
door of the suite reserved for Millionaires and other Royalties, my
heart was giving little ineffective jumps in my breast, like--as my old
nurse used to say--"a frog with three legs."

"Come in!" called a voice with sharp, jagged edges.

I opened the door. In a private drawing-room as different as the
personality of one woman from another, sat Lady Turnour. She faced me as
I entered, so I had a good look at her, before casting down my eyes and
composing my countenance to the self-abnegating meekness which I
conceived fitting to a _femme de chambre comme il faut_.

She was enthroned on a sofa. One could hardly say less, there was so
much of her, and it was all arranged as perfectly as if she were about
to be photographed. No normal woman, merely sitting down, with no other
object than to be comfortable, would curve the tail of her gown round in
front of her like a sickle; or have just the point of one shoe daintily
poised on a footstool; or the sofa-cushions at exactly the right angle
behind her head to make a background; or the finger with all her best
rings on it, keeping the place in an English illustrated journal.

I dared not believe that she had posed for me. It must have been for
Lady Kilmarny; and that I alone should see the picture was a bad
beginning.

She is of the age when a woman can still tell people that she is forty,
hoping they will exclaim politely, "Impossible!"

It is not enough for her to be a Ladyship and a millionairess. She will
be a beauty as well, or at all costs she will be looked at. To that end
are her eyebrows and lashes black as jet, her undulated hair crimson,
her lips a brighter shade of the same colour, and her skin of magnolia
pallor, like the heroines of the novels which are sure to be her
favourites. Once, she must have been handsome, a hollyhock queen of a
kitchen-garden kingdom; but she would be far more