m not dreaming and you are not your own
great-great-grandmother?"

"No, I am myself. But I am supposed to be like her, though."

"It is the very image of you. She has your air and carriage of the
head, and--and--" he looked at it very carefully under the electric
light which sprouts from a twisted bunch of brass lilies on the wall,
their stalks suggesting a modern Louis XV. nightmare.

"And what?"

"Well, never mind. Now I want to hear her story." And we both sat down
again for the third time on the tulip-sofa.

I told him the history just as I had told him the outline of my life
the day in the Harley woods. Only, as then I felt I was speaking of
another person, now I seemed to be talking of myself when I came to
the part of walking up the guillotine steps.

"And so they cut her head off--poor little lady!" said Antony, when I
had finished, and he looked straight into my eyes.

The pillow of art-needlework and frills had fallen to the floor--even
it could not remain comfortably on the hard seat! There was nothing
between us on the sofa.

Antony leaned forward, close to me. His voice was strangely moved.

"Comtesse!" he began, when McGreggor knocked at the door.

"Mr. Gurrage is calling you, ma'am," she said, in her heavy, Scotch
voice, "and he seems in a hurry, ma'am."

"Ambrosine!" echoed impatiently in the hall.

"Why, it must be dressing-time!" said Antony, calmly, looking at his
watch. "I must not keep you," and he quietly left the room as Augustus
burst in from my bedroom door.

"Where on earth have you been?" he said, crossly. "That Dodd woman
has been driving us all mad! Willie Dodd came and joined us at bridge
and took McCormack's place, and the old she-tike came after him and
chattered like a monkey until she got him away. Where were you that
you did not look after her?"

"I was here, in my sitting-room, talking to Sir Antony Thornhirst," I
said, almost laughing. The picture of Mrs. Dodd at the bridge-table
amused me to think of. Augustus saw me smiling, and he looked less
ruffled.

"She is an old wretch," he said. "I wish I had not to ask Willie Dodd
every year, but business is business, and I'll trouble you to be civil
to them. We will weed out the whole of this lot, gradually, now. The
mater will go off to Bournemouth at this time of the year, and so,
by-and-by, we can have nothing but smart people."

The evening passed in an endless, boring round. This sort of company
does not adapt its