"not a new Lady Hammerton; only a rather
new Miss Flaxman; and that, I assure you, is something very preferable."

"I'm quite sure the Master knows something dreadful about your
great-grandmother, Mr. Fletcher," laughed Mrs. Shaw.

"I think we'd better go before he tells it," interposed Mrs. Fletcher,
who saw that Milly was feeling shy.

When the ladies had left, the men reseated themselves at the table and
there was a pause. Everyone waited for the Master, who seemed meditating
speech.

"My mother," he said--and somehow they all felt startled to learn the
fact that the Master had had a mother--"my mother knew Lady Hammerton in
the twenties. She was often at Bath."

The thin, staccato voice broke off abruptly, and three out of the five
other men present being the Master's pupils, remained silent, knowing he
had not finished. But Mr. Toovey, a young don overflowing with mild
intelligence, exclaimed, deferentially:

"Really, Master! Really! How extremely interesting! Now do please tell
us a great deal about Lady Hammerton."

The Master took no notice whatever of Toovey. He sat about a minute
longer in his familiar posture, looking before him, his little round
hands on his little round knees. Then he said:

"She was a raddled woman."

And his pupils knew he had finished speaking. What he had said was
disappointingly little, but uttered in that strange high voice of his,
it contained an infinite deal more than appeared on the face of it. A
whole discreditable past seemed to emerge from that one word "raddled."
Ian Stewart, to whose imagination the woman in the picture made a
strange appeal, now broke a lance with the Master on her account.

"She may have been raddled, Master," he said, "but she must have been
very remarkable and charming too. Hammerton himself was no fool, yet he
adored her to the last."

The Master seemed to hope some one else would speak; but finding that no
one did, he uttered again:

"Men often adore bad wives. That does not make them good ones."

Stewart tossed a rebel lock of raven black hair back from his forehead.

"Pardon me, Master, it does make them good wives for those men."

"Oh, surely not good for their higher natures!" protested Toovey,
fervently.

The Master took three deliberate sips of port wine.

"I think, Stewart, we are discussing matters we know very little about,"
he said, in a particularly high, dry voice; and every one felt that the
discussion was closed. Then