il her face
to a person of my special business with it; so that the question of the
portrait was by common consent left to depend on that of the installation
of a successor to her late companion. Such a successor, I gathered from
Mrs. Munden, widowed childless and lonely, as well as inapt for the minor
offices, she had absolutely to have; a more or less humble _alter ago_ to
deal with the servants, keep the accounts, make the tea and watch the
window-blinds. Nothing seemed more natural than that she should marry
again, and obviously that might come; yet the predecessors of Miss Dadd
had been contemporaneous with a first husband, so that others formed in
her image might be contemporaneous with a second. I was much occupied in
those months at any rate, and these questions and their ramifications
losing themselves for a while to my view, I was only brought back to them
by Mrs. Munden's arrival one day with the news that we were all right
again--her sister-in-law was once more "suited." A certain Mrs. Brash,
an American relative whom she hadn't seen for years, but with whom she
had continued to communicate, was to come out to her immediately; and
this person, it appeared, could be quite trusted to meet the conditions.
She was ugly--ugly enough, without abuse of it, and was unlimitedly good.
The position offered her by Lady Beldonald was moreover exactly what she
needed; widowed also, after many troubles and reverses, with her fortune
of the smallest, and her various children either buried or placed about,
she had never had time or means to visit England, and would really be
grateful in her declining years for the new experience and the pleasant
light work involved in her cousin's hospitality. They had been much
together early in life and Lady Beldonald was immensely fond of her--would
in fact have tried to get hold of her before hadn't Mrs. Brash been
always in bondage to family duties, to the variety of her tribulations. I
daresay I laughed at my friend's use of the term "position"--the
position, one might call it, of a candlestick or a sign-post, and I
daresay I must have asked if the special service the poor lady was to
render had been made clear to her. Mrs. Munden left me in any case with
the rather droll image of her faring forth across the sea quite
consciously and resignedly to perform it.

The point of the communication had however been that my sitter was again
looking up and would doubtless, on the arrival a