one day, and said: "Who's the piteous black mouse you've tamed?"

"I beg your pardon, Jim?" said Lady Yalding.

"The crushed apple-blossom in a black frock--one meets her about the
corridors. Gloomy sight. Chestnut hair. Princess-in-exile sort of look."

"Oh, _that_! It's mother's companion."

"Poor little devil!" said the Honourable James. "What does she do now
the cat's away? I beg your pardon--my mind was running on mice."

"Do? I don't know," said Lady Yalding a little guiltily. "She's a good,
quiet little thing--literary tastes, reads Browning, and all that sort
of rot. She's all right."

"Why don't you give her a show? She'd take the shine out of some of the
girls here if you had her dressed."

"My dear Jim," Lady Yalding said, "she's all right as she is. What's the
good of turning the child's head and giving her notions out of her
proper station?"

"If I were that child I'd like to have a little bit of a fling just for
once. The poor little rat looks starved, as though it hadn't laughed for
a year. Then it's Christmas--peace and goodwill, and all that, don't you
know. If I were you I'd ask her down a bit----"

Lady Yalding thought--a thing she rarely did.

"Well," she said, "it _is_ pretty slow for her, I suppose. I'll send her
home to her people."

"On Christmas Eve? Fog and frost, and the trains all anyhow? Fanny,
Fanny!"

"Oh, very well. We'll have her down, and go the whole hog. Only don't
make a fool of the child, Jim; she's a good little thing."

And that was how the dream-dressed Lady Yalding came to sweep into the
old lady's sitting-room--it was as full of mahogany, by the way, as
Maisie's home in Lewisham--and spoke so kindly of Maisie's loneliness,
that the girl could have fallen down and worshipped at her Paris shoes.

When Maisie, in the figured lavender satin that had been her mother's,
swept across the great hall on the arm of the Honourable James, she felt
that this indeed was life. Here was the great world with its infinite
possibilities.

"How did you get on?" his sister-in-law asked him later.

"Oh, it's quite a decent sort of little mouse," he said. "Wants to make
sure you see how cultivated it is, quotes poetry--what?--and talks about
art. It's a little touching and all that to see how busy it is putting
all its poor little stock in the tiny shop-window."

Maisie, alone in her room, was walking up and down, trailing the
lavender satin, recalling with kindled eyes and red-ro