illness
would keep her from coming."

"Ah, a very different thing." He turned to Durant, blushing and
bridling in his stiff collar as if the important distinction had
been a subtlety of his own.

He curled himself up in his chair, and Durant caught him smiling to
himself, a contemplative, almost voluptuous smile; was it at the
prospect of another victim?

Who the devil, he wondered, is Mrs. Fazakerly?

II

Mrs. Fazakerly did not keep him wondering long. Already she was
tripping into the room with a gleeful and inquisitive assurance. A
small person, with a round colorless face and snub features finished
off with a certain piquant ugliness. Her eyes seemed to be screwed
up by a habit of laughter, and the same cheerful tendency probably
accounted for the twisting of her eyebrows. Mrs. Fazakerly must have
been forty and a widow. She was dressed with distinction in the
half-mourning of a very black silk gown and a very white neck and
shoulders. She greeted Miss Tancred affectionately, glanced at
Durant with marked approval, and swept the Colonel an exaggerated
curtsey, playfully implying that she had met him before that day. It
struck Durant that nature had meant Mrs. Fazakerly to be vulgar, and
that it spoke well for Mrs. Fazakerly that so far she had frustrated
the designs of nature. He rather thought he was going to like Mrs.
Fazakerly; she looked as if she would not bore him.

If Mrs. Fazakerly was going to like Durant, as yet her glance merely
indicated that she liked the look of him. Durant, as it happened,
was almost as plain for a man as Miss Tancred was for a woman; but
he was interesting, and he looked it; he was distinguished, and he
looked that, too; he was an artist, and he did not look it at all;
he cultivated no eccentricities of manner, he indulged in no dreamy
fantasies of dress. Other people besides Mrs. Fazakerly had approved
of Maurice Durant.

Unfortunately the Colonel's instant monopoly of the lady had the
effect of throwing Durant and his hostess on each other's mercy
during dinner, a circumstance that seemed greatly to entertain Mrs.
Fazakerly. Probably a deep acquaintance with Coton Manor made her
feel a delightful incongruity in Durant's appearance there, since,
as her gaze so frankly intimated, she found him interesting. He was
roused from a fit of more than usual abstraction to find her little
gray eyes twinkling at him across the soup. Mrs. Fazakerly, for
purposes of humorous observa