REL 274

XXVI VERA'S ADVENTURE 282

XXVII AUNT WILLIAM'S DAY 292

XXVIII THE TWELFTH HOUR 302

CHAPTER I

FELICITY

"Hallo, Greenstock! Lady Chetwode in?"

"Her ladyship is not at home, sir. But she is sure to see you, Master
Savile," said the butler, with a sudden and depressing change of manner,
from correct impassibility to the conventional familiarity of a
patronising old retainer.

"Dressing, eh? You look all right Greenstock."

"Well, I am well, and I am not well, Master Savile, if you can
understand that, sir. My harsthma" (so he pronounced it), "'as been
exceedingly troublesome lately."

"Ah, that's capital!" Not listening, the boy--he was sixteen, dark, and
very handsome, with a determined expression, and generally with an air
of more self-control than seemed required for the occasion--walked up
deliberately, three steps at a time, knocked, with emphasis, at his
sister's dressing-room door, and said--

"I say, Felicity, can I come in?"

"Who's there? Don't come in!"

Upon which invitation he entered the room with a firm step.

"Oh, it's you, Savile darling. I am glad to see you! Dear pet! Come and
tell me all about everything--papa and the party--and, look out, dear,
don't tread on my dresses! Give Mr. Crofton a chair, Everett. Even you
mustn't sit down on a perfectly new hat!"

Felicity was a lovely little blonde creature about twenty-five years
old, dressed in a floating Watteau-like garment of vaporous blue,
painted with faded pink roses. She was seated in a large carved and
gilded chair, opposite an excessively Louis-Quinze mirror, while her
pale golden hair was being brushed out by a brown, inanimate-looking
maid. Her little oval face, with its soft cloudy hair growing low on the
forehead, long blue eyes, and rosebud mouth, had something of the
romantic improbability of an eighteenth-century miniature. From the age
of two Felicity had been an acknowledged beauty. She profited by her
grasp of this fact merely by being more frank than most charming people,
and more natural than most disagreeable ones. With little
self-consciousness, she took a cool sportsmanlike pleasure in the effect
she produced, and perhaps enjoyed the envy and admiration she had
excited in her perambulator in Kensington Gardens almost as much as her
most showy successes in later life.

The most effective of these (so far) had b