seat from which she had risen. Every minute she was realizing
with a more awful clearness that she, whose one appearance on the stage
had been short and disastrous, was cast to play the leading part in a
public play before a large and brilliant audience. She hardly heard
Fitzroy's bitter remarks on Mrs. Shaw--not forgetting Jim Morrison--or
Lady Wolvercote exclaiming in a voice almost dreamy with amazement:

"Really it's too extraordinary!"

"I'm very sorry Mrs. Shaw won't take the part," said Milly, clasping and
unclasping her slender fingers, "for I know I can't do it myself."

Fitzroy was protesting, but she forced herself to continue: "You don't
know what I'm like when I'm nervous. When we had _tableaux vivants_ at
Ascham I was supposed to be Charlotte putting a wreath on Werther's urn,
and I trembled so much that I knocked the urn down. It was only
card-board, so it didn't break, but every one laughed and the tableau
was spoiled."

Fitzroy and his aunt cried out that that was nothing, a first
appearance; any one could see she had got over that now. Pale, with
terrified eyes, she looked from one to the other of her tormentors, who
continued to sing the praises of her past prowess on the boards and to
foretell the unprecedented harvest of laurels she would reap at
Besselsfield. The higher their enthusiasm rose, the more profound became
her dejection. There seemed no loop-hole for escape, unless the earth
would open and swallow her, which however much to be desired was hardly
to be expected.

The ting of a bicycle-bell below did not seem to promise assistance, for
cyclists affected the quiet street. But it happened that this bicycle
bore Ian to the door. He did not notice the coronet on the carriage
which stood before it, and assumed it to belong to one of the three or
four ladies in Oxford who kept such equipages. Yet in the blank state of
Milly's memory, he was sorry she had not denied herself to visitors,
which Mildred had already learned to do with a freedom only possible to
women who are assured social success. Commonly the sight of a carriage
would have sent him tiptoeing past the drawing-room, but now, vaguely
uneasy, he came straight in. He looked particularly tall in the frame of
the doorway, so low that his black hair almost touched the lintel;
particularly handsome in the shaded, white-panelled room, into which the
dark glow of his sunburned skin and brown eyes, bright with exercise,
seemed to bring th