rising, that resentment from the sun-goddess was a peril to
be reckoned with. Smiling, though languidly smiling, she advanced up the
room, after her graceful and involuntary pause. White fringes rippled
softly round her; a white train trailed behind her; on her breast the
silken cloak that she wore over a transparent under-robe was clasped
with pearls and silver. She was very lovely, very stately, very simple;
but she struck her one hypercritical observer as somewhat prepared;
calculated and conscious, as well.

"Thanks, dearest friend," she said to Mrs. Forrester, who, meeting her
halfway down the room and taking her hand, asked her solicitously how
she did; "I am now a little rested; but it has been a bad night and a
busy morning." She spoke with a slightly foreign accent in a voice at
once fatigued and sonorous. Her eyes, clear, penetrating and singularly
steady, passed over the assembled faces, turned, all of them, towards
herself.

She greeted Sir Alliston with a welcoming smile and a lift of the
strange crooked eyebrows, and to Miss Scrotton, who, eager and
illuminated, was beside her: "_Ah, ma cherie_," she said, resting her
hand affectionately on her shoulder. Mrs. Forrester had her other hand,
and, so standing between her two friends, she bowed gravely and
graciously to Lady Campion, to Miss Harding, to Mrs. Harding--who, in
the stress of this fulfilment had become plum-coloured--and to Gregory
Jardine. Then she was seated. Mrs. Forrester poured out her tea, Miss
Harding passed her cake and bread-and-butter, Lady Campion bent to her
with frank and graceful compliments, Miss Scrotton sat at her feet on a
low settle, and Sir Alliston, leaning on the back of her chair, looked
down at her with eyes of antique devotion. Gregory was left on the
outskirts of the group and his attention was attracted by the face of
little Mrs. Harding, who, all unnoticed and unseated, gazed upon Madame
Okraska with the intent liquid eye of a pious dog; the wavering,
uncertain smile that played upon her lips was like the humble thudding
of the dog's tail. Gregory remembered her face now as one of those, rapt
and hypnotized, that he had seen on the platform the night before. In
the ovation that Madame Okraska had received at the end of the concert
he had noticed this same plum-coloured little lady seizing and kissing
the great woman's hand. Shy, by temperament, as he saw, to the point of
suffering, he felt sure that only the infection o