time."

"Oh," replied Mavick, with more good-humor in his laugh than he had shown
before, "you needn't beat about the bush. Have you seen Evelyn?"

"No, not since that dinner at the Van Cortlandts'."

"Huh! for myself, I should be pleased to see you any time, Mr. Burnett.
Mrs. Mavick hasn't felt like seeing anybody lately. But I'll see, I'll
see."

The two men rose and shook hands, as men shake hands when they have an
understanding.

"I'm glad you are doing well," Mr. Mavick added; "your life is before
you, mine is behind me; that makes a heap of difference."

Within a few days Philip received a note from Mrs. Mavick--not an
effusive note, not an explanatory note, not an apologetic note, simply a
note as if nothing unusual had happened--if Mr. Burnett had leisure,
would he drop in at five o'clock in Irving Place for a cup of tea?

Not one minute by his watch after the hour named, Philip rang the bell
and was shown into a little parlor at the front. There was only one
person in the room, a lady in exquisite toilet, who rose rather languidly
to meet him, exactly as if the visitor were accustomed to drop in to tea
at that hour.

Philip hesitated a moment near the door, embarrassed by a mortifying
recollection of his last interview with Mrs. Mavick, and in that moment
he saw her face. Heavens, what a change! And yet it was a smiling face.

There is a portrait of Carmen by a foreign artist, who was years ago the
temporary fashion in New York, painted the year after her second marriage
and her return from Rome, which excited much comment at the time. Philip
had seen it in more than one portrait exhibition.

Its technical excellence was considerable. The artist had evidently
intended to represent a woman piquant and fascinating, if not strictly
beautiful. Many persons said it was lovely. Other critics said that,
whether the artist intended it or not, he had revealed the real character
of the subject. There was something sinister in its beauty. One artist,
who was out of fashion as an idealist, said, of course privately, that
the more he looked at it the more hideous it became to him--like one of
Blake's objective portraits of a "soul"--the naked soul of an evil woman
showing through the mask of all her feminine fascinations--the possible
hell, so he put it, under a woman's charm.

It was this in the portrait that Philip saw in the face smiling a
welcome--like an old, sweetly smiling Lalage--from which had passed a