it than usual. It looked more alive, too, and
it marked in, he thought, an exquisite way the beautiful shape of her
head. A black riband was cleverly entangled in it, and a big diamond
shone upon the riband in front above her white forehead, weary with
the years, but uncommonly expressive. She wore black as usual, and had
another broad black riband round her throat with a fine diamond broach
fastened to it. Her gown was slightly open at the front. There were
magnificent diamond earrings in her ears. They made Craven think of
the jewels stolen long ago at the station in Paris. This evening the
whiteness of her hair seemed wonderful, as the whiteness of thickly
powdered hair sometimes seems. And her eyes beneath it were amazingly
vivid, startlingly alive in their glancing brightness. They looked
careless and laughingly self-possessed as she came up to greet the girl
and young man, matching delightfully her careless and self-possessed
movement.

At that moment Craven realized, as he had certainly never realized
before, what a beauty--in his mind he said what a "stunning
beauty"--Lady Sellingworth must once have been. Even her face seemed to
him in some way altered to-night, though he could not have told how.

Certainly she looked younger than usual. He was positive of that: still
positive when he saw her standing by Miss Van Tuyn and taking her hand.
Then she turned to him and gave him a friendly and careless, almost
haphazard, greeting, still smiling and looking ready for anything.
And then at once they went into the restaurant up the broad steps.
And Craven noticed that everyone they passed by glanced at Lady
Sellingworth.

At that moment he felt very proud of her friendship. He even felt a
touch of romance in it, of a strange and unusual romance far removed
from the sort of thing usually sung of by poets and written of by
novelists.

"She is unusual!" he thought. "And so am I; and our friendship is
unusual too. There has never before been anything quite like it."

And he glowed with a warming sense of difference from ordinary life.

But Miss Van Tuyn was claiming his urgent attention, and a waiter was
giving him Whitstable oysters, and Chablis was being poured into his
glass, and the band was beginning to play a selection from the music of
Grieg, full of the poetry and the love of the North, where deep passions
come out of the snows and last often longer than the loves of the South.
He must give himself up to it