ost of Louis's
utterances, it was full of tact.

Defeat? She had brooded over the idea, and then apparently she had an
inspiration.

From that day, wherever there was a sufficiently important crowd to see
her, Mrs. Nevill Tyson was to be seen. She was generally with Louis
Stanistreet, who was not a figure to be overlooked; she was always
exquisitely dressed; and sometimes, not often, she was delicately painted
and powdered. Mrs. Nevill Tyson hated what was commonplace and loud; and
she had to make herself conspicuous in a season when women dressed
_fortissimo_, and a fashionable crowd was like a bed of flowers in June.
Somehow she managed to strike some resonant minor chord of color that
went throbbing through that confused orchestra. Everywhere she went
people turned and stared at her as she flashed by; and apparently her one
object was to be stared at. She became as much of a celebrity as any
woman with a character and without a position "in society" can become.
If she were counterfeiting a type, enough of the original Mrs. Nevill
Tyson remained to give her own supernatural _naeivete_ to the character.
Stanistreet was completely puzzled by this new freak; it looked like
recklessness, it looked like vanity, it looked--it looked like an
innocent parody of guilt. He had given in to her whim, as he had given
In to every wish of hers, but he was not quite sure that he liked the
frankness, the publicity of the thing. He wondered how so small a woman
contrived to attract so large a share of attention in a city where pretty
women were as common as paving-stones. Perhaps it was partly owing to the
persistence and punctuality of her movements: she patronized certain
theatres, haunted certain thoroughfares at certain times. She had an
affection for Piccadilly, a sentiment for Oxford Circus, and a passion
for the Strand. Louis could sympathize with these preferences; he, too,
liked to walk up and down the Embankment in the summer twilight--though
why such abrupt stoppages? Why such impetuous speed? He could understand
a human being finding a remote interest in the Houses of Parliament, but
he could not understand why Mrs. Nevill Tyson should love to linger
outside the doors of the War Office.

Her ways were indeed inscrutable; but he had learnt to know them all, not
a gesture escaped him. How well he knew the turn of her head and the
sudden flash of her face as they entered a theatre, and her eyes swept
the house, eager, expec