ht of her, offered no
invitation to enter. He merely stood in front of the half-opened door.

"May I come in, Mr. Ollerenshaw?" she said, very urbanely. "I hope you
will excuse this very informal call. I've altered my dinner hour in
order to pay it."

And she smiled. The smile seemed to rouse him from a spell.

"Come in, missis, do!" he conjured her, warmly.

He was James; he was even Jimmy; but he was also a man, very much a man,
though the fact had only recently begun to impress itself on him. Mrs.
Prockter, while a dowager--portly, possibly fussy, perhaps slightly
comic to a younger generation--was still considerably younger than
James. With her rich figure, her excellent complexion, her
carefully-cherished hair, and her apparel, she was a woman to captivate
a man of sixty, whose practical experience of the sex extended over
nine days.

"Thank you," said she, gratefully.

He shut the front door, as if he were shutting a bird in a cage; and he
also shut the door leading to the kitchen--a door which had not been
shut since the kitchen fire smoked in the celebrated winter of 1897. She
sat down at once in the easy-chair.

"Ah!" she exclaimed, in relief. And then she began to fan herself with a
fan which was fastened to her person by a chain that might have moored a
steamer.

James, searching about for something else to do while he was collecting
his forces, drew the blind and lighted the gas. But it was not yet dark.

"I wonder what you will think of me, calling like this?" she said, with
a sardonic smile.

It was apparent that, whatever he thought of her, she would not be
disturbed or abashed. She was utterly at her ease. She could not,
indeed, have recalled the moment when she had not been at her ease. She
sat in the front room with all the external symptoms of being at home.
This was what chiefly surprised James Ollerenshaw in his grand
guests--they all took his front room for granted. They betrayed no
emotion at its smallness or its plainness, or its eccentricities. He
would somehow have expected them to signify, overtly or covertly, that
that kind of room was not the kind of room to which they were
accustomed.

"Anyhow, I'm glad to see ye, Mrs. Prockter," James returned.

A speech which did not in the least startle Mrs. Prockter, who was
thoroughly used to people being glad to see her. But it startled James.
He had uttered it instinctively; it was the expression of an instinctive
gladness which took