ye of a connoisseur the magnificent
yet girlish torso might have recalled a Bacchante by Skopas. To her
right rose the rugged sides of Garthfell, purple and scarlet in the
subdued light; to the left was Felsbeck, and from her feet the ground
fell away abruptly till it met the immemorial woods of Supwell. Among
them Aurora could distinguish the massive Boadicean keep of Supwell
Castle, strangely yet harmoniously blended with the neo-Byzantine
portico of white marble designed by Inigo Jones for the thirty-first
Earl. She remembered vaguely that she was attending a reception there
to-night; but her gaze soon left the noble pile--so typical of all that
is best in English architecture--to rest upon the humbler neighbouring
group of Lowmere cottages. In one she knew old Ralph, the shepherd, was
dying of a painful form of spinal catarrh, directly attributable to the
cesspool at his front door; in another the mother of fifteen children
was nursing the only remaining one through an attack of mumps, and in a
third the breadwinner was lying in the malignant grip of abdominal
influenza. Aurora mentally reviewed the chief points of Socialism,
Individualism, Syndicalism and Socinianism, as represented by the select
group of thinkers to which Cecil belonged.

Following a noiseless footman in the gorgeous Supwell liveries, Mrs.
Lovelord and Aurora took up their position under a rare palm at the head
of the great ebony staircase, which a royal personage was said to have
coveted, and watched the Earl and Countess receive their guests. Mrs.
Lovelord's keen eye noted that the Earl was standing on the Countess's
train, a priceless piece of Venetian point which had once belonged to
the Empress Theodora. Aurora's attention was attracted by a tall
grey-haired man wearing the Ribbon of the Garter half-hidden under a
variety of lesser decorations; he was talking eagerly, vivaciously to
the notorious Duchess of Almondsbury. Cecil, who had joined Aurora at
once, whispered that the man was Professor Villeray.

"They say he knows every crowned head in Europe," he said. The great
scientist was relating anecdote after anecdote of the people he had
known--Charlemagne, Machiavelli, Newman, Dickens, the Shakspeares,
father and son. There followed a racy story, inimitably told, of Miss
Mitford in her less regenerate days. Aurora turned away.

"Would you care to take a turn through the rooms?" Cecil asked. "The
Rembrandts are in tremendous form to-nigh