ng him?"

"Who is Dr. Lelius?" asked Lady Barnes, putting up her eyeglass.

Mrs. French explained that he was a South German art-critic, from
Wuerzburg, with a great reputation. She had already met him at Eton and
at Oxford.

"Another expert!" said Lady Barnes with a shrug.

The pair passed the window, absorbed apparently in conversation. Mrs.
French escaped. Lady Barnes was left to discontent and solitude.

But the solitude was not for long.

When Elsie French descended for tea, an hour later, she was aware, from
a considerable distance, of people and tumult in the drawing-room.
Daphne's soprano voice--agreeable, but making its mark always, like its
owner--could be heard running on. The young mistress of the house seemed
to be admonishing, instructing, someone. Could it be her mother-in-law?

When Elsie entered, Daphne was walking up and down in excitement.

"One cannot really live with bad pictures because they happen to be
one's ancestors! We won't do them any harm, mamma! of course not. There
is a room upstairs where they can be stored--most carefully--and anybody
who is interested in them can go and look at them. If they had only been
left as they were painted!--not by Lely, of course, but by some drapery
man in his studio--_passe encore_! they might have been just bearable.
But you see some wretched restorer went and daubed them all over a few
years ago."

"We went to the best man we could find! We took the best advice!" cried
Lady Barnes, sitting stiff and crimson in a deep arm-chair, opposite the
luckless row of portraits that Daphne was denouncing.

"I'm sure you did. But then, you see, nobody knew anything at all about
it in those days. The restorers were all murderers. Ask Dr. Lelius."

Daphne pointed to the stranger, who was leaning against an arm-chair
beside her in an embarrassed attitude, as though he were endeavouring to
make the chair a buffer between himself and Lady Barnes.

Dr. Lelius bowed.

"It is a modern art," he said with diffidence, and an accent creditably
slight--"a quite modern art. We hafe a great man at Wuerzburg."

"I don't suppose he professes to know anything about English pictures,
does he?" asked Lady Barnes with scorn.

"Ach!--I do not propose that Mrs. Barnes entrust him wid dese pictures,
Madame. It is now too late."

And the willowy German looked, with a half-repressed smile, at the row
of pictures--all staring at the bystander with the same saucer eyes, the
sam