ngland fashion and beauty, a lady who both on her
husband's side and her own claimed all the splendours of Knickerbocker
descent. The husband was dead, the fortune--except for a meagre bone or
two with little meat thereon--was eaten all away. Mrs. Diedrich and the
sympathetic Gertrude's mother had been friends. There was nothing more
natural or more befitting than that the wealthy Baroness de Wyeth should
find an asylum for this superannuated slave of fortune, though Paul knew
perfectly well that she was no more than a buckler against scandal at
the first. But reasonable as he was compelled to admit such a precaution
to be, he was not very long in discovering that the impoverished lady
was a buckler against himself, and that she was used to prevent that
old familiar laying of heads together, and the old familiar communion of
hearts, in which, by dint of careful manoeuvring, a bare sixty seconds
might sometimes he snatched for a solitude of two.

There should have been a drive that afternoon--Gertrude and Paul, with
Mrs. Diedrich to play gooseberry--and Mrs. Diedrich had fallen ill. Paul
presented himself at the appointed hour, and no Gertrude was there to
meet him. Instead of the Presence a note couched in the chilliest terms:

'Dear Friend,

'Mrs. Diedrich is shockingly unwell to-day, and I cannot leave her.
Profoundest regrets for a lost pleasure.

'Sincerely, 'G. de W.'

'My luck!' said Paul bitterly to himself; for he had been more than once
disappointed of late. But he found grace enough to express his sorrow,
send his compliments and good wishes, and to withdraw. He went strolling
about in unknown ways, with all manner of unpleasant things to think of.
He not only made his momentary disappointment the greatest of them all,
but strove to make it so. And yet the others would intrude. Here was a
letter from Darco expressing grave disappointment with the end of the
second act of their latest piece. Darco coughing up his stammering
gutturals as a speaker of English was one man, and Darco with a pen in
his hand was another.

'It crumbles,' wrote the critic, 'at the very instant at which it should
triumph. It is vague, unconvincing, wrong. You leave me unanswered for
six whole weeks, and at the end you send me this incoherent sandheap,
when your promises had given me the right to expect a solid piece of
well-worked marble. I do not know whether you are well or ill, whether
you desire to continue the work or no. All