is always so kind," answered Dick vaguely, "and nobody's
breakfasts are so pleasant as yours, Lady Goldthred."

"I'm _too_ glad you think so," answered his hostess, who, like
a good-hearted woman as she was, took enormous pains with these
festivities, congratulating herself, when she washed off her rouge,
and doffed her robes of ceremony at night, that she had got through
the great penance of her year. "You're always so good-natured. But I
_do_ think men like to come here. The country air, you know, and
the scenery, and plenty of pretty people. Now, there's Lord
Bearwarden--look, he's talking to Miss Bruce, under the cedar--he's
actually driven over from Windsor, and though he's a way of being
so fine and _blase_ and all that, he don't look much bored at this
moment, does he? Twenty thousand a year, they say, and been everywhere
and done everything. Now, I fancy, he wants to marry, for he's much
older, you know, than he looks. To hear him talk, you'd think he was
a hundred, and broken-hearted into the bargain. For my part, I've no
patience with a melancholy man; but then I'm not a young lady. You
know him, though, of course?"

Dick's reply, if he made one, was drowned in a burst of brass music
that deafened people at intervals throughout the afternoon, and Lady
Goldthred's attention wandered to fresh arrivals, for whom, with fresh
smiles and untiring energy, she elaborated many more remarks of a
similar tendency.

Dick Stanmore _did_ know Lord Bearwarden, as every man about London
knows every other man leading the same profitable life. There were
many whom he would have preferred as rivals; but thinking he detected
signs of weariness on Maud's face (it had already come to this, that
he studied her countenance, and winced to see it smile on any one
else), he crossed the lawn, that he might fill the place by her side,
to which he considered himself as well entitled as another.

His progress took some little time, what, with bowing to one lady,
treading on the dress of another, and parrying the attack of a third
who wanted him to give her daughter a cup of tea; so that by the time
Dick reached her Lord Bearwarden had left Miss Bruce to the attentions
of another guest, more smart than gentlemanlike, in whose appearance
there was something indefinably out of keeping with the rest. Dick
started. It was the man with whom he had seen Maud walking before
luncheon in the Square.

People were pairing for a dance on the lawn,