re to
dissect the mentality and character of his friend with another.
Something in him even had an instinct to protect Lady Sellingworth from
Miss Van Tuyn. That was surely absurd; unless, indeed, age always needs
protection from the cruelty of youth.

Francis Braybrooke began to speak about Paris, and again Miss Van Tuyn
said that she would never rest till she had persuaded Lady Sellingworth
to renew her acquaintance with that intense and apparently light-hearted
city, which contains so many secret terrors.

"You will come some day," she said, with a sort of almost ruthless
obstinacy.

"Why not?" said Lady Sellingworth. "I have been very happy in Paris."

"And yet you have deserted it for years and years! You are an enigma.
Isn't she, Mr. Braybrooke?"

Before Braybrooke had time to reply to this direct question an
interruption occurred. Two ladies, coming in to dinner accompanied
by two young men, paused by Braybrooke's table, and someone said in a
clear, hard voice:

"What a dinky little party! And where are you all going afterwards?"

Craven and Braybrooke got up to greet two famous members of the "old
guard," Lady Wrackley and Mrs. Ackroyde. Lady Sellingworth and Miss
Van Tuyn turned in their chairs, and for a moment there was a little
disjointed conversation, in the course of which it came out that this
quartet, too, was bound for the Shaftesbury Theatre.

"You are coming out of your shell, Adela! Better late than never!"
said Lady Wrackley to Lady Sellingworth, while Miss Van Tuyn quietly
collected the two young men, both of whom she knew, with her violet
eyes. "I hear of you all over the place."

She glanced penetratingly at Craven with her carefully made-up eyes,
which were the eyes of a handsome and wary bird. Her perfectly
arranged hair was glossy brown, with glints in it like the colour of a
horse-chestnut. She showed her wonderful teeth in the smile which came
like a sudden gleam of electric light, and went as if a hand had turned
back the switch.

"I'm becoming dissipated," said Lady Sellingworth. "Three evenings out
in one month! If I have one foot in the grave, I shall have the other in
the Shaftesbury Theatre to-night."

One of the young men, a fair, horsey-looking boy, with a yellow
moustache, a turned-up nose, and an almost abnormally impudent and larky
expression, laughed in a very male and soldierly way; the other, who was
dark, with a tall figure and severe grey eyes, looked impenetrab