very good-looking." A pause, and the
first voice rejoined: "Show him into the drawing-room, and ask him to sit
down."

The maid came back with this message, and took Charles into a large sombre
room. She gave him a fluttered glance of coquetry as she offered him a
chair, as though she would have liked to linger with such an unusual
visitor, then went out softly, closing the door behind her.

The room into which he had been ushered was furnished after some faded
standard of departed elegance with tapestried chairs, and couches, painted
screens, landscapes worked in black lutestring on white silk, and
collections of stuffed humming-birds which gazed wanly at the intruder
from glassy eyes. A massive dead Christ in Gobelin tapestry covered the
whole side of one wall, and from the opposite one the threaded features of
Joseph and his brethren stared gloomily down. These subjects accorded ill
with several pieces of marble statuary scattered about the room--a reeling
Bacchus, a nude Psyche, and an unchaste presentment of Leda drooping her
head over an amorous swan. A broken statue of a pastoral shepherd had been
laid on a table in the corner and partly covered with a cloth, where it
looked very much like a corpse awaiting its turn in a dissecting-room.

Charles had a dreary wait in these surroundings. At first he sat still,
but as the time passed he endeavoured to distract his anxious thoughts by
walking round the room looking at the extraordinary collections of objects
it contained. He was earnestly scrutinizing a lutestring picture depicting
"The Origin of the Dimple"--a cupid poking his forefinger into the double
chin of a fat languishing female--when the door opened and a woman
entered.

She was tall and thin, and had reached that period of life when it costs a
woman an effort to look in a mirror because of the menace of approaching
age which stares back from the depth of frightened eyes. Her dress,
however, suggested that she could not bring herself to believe she was yet
out of the hunt, but was still trying to follow it breathlessly on the
back of that broken-kneed and sorry steed, late middle-age. There was
something ridiculous in the girlish attire intended to convince her fellow
creatures that her day was not over; something terrible in the low blouse,
short skirt, silk stockings, gauze, lace and fluttering ribbons with which
she sought to delude the sneering figure of waiting Time.

Charles's first startled thoug