above the mantelpiece.

"By George! How did I manage to miss that?"

He stared at it with intense interest--almost with a sense of shock.
Somewhere--he could not determine where--he had seen that face before.

The picture was a half-length portrait of a woman. There was something
extraordinarily queenly and at the same time patient in her attitude.
Her hands, which were out of sight, seemed to be folded. She was seated,
leaning forward; her head was turned towards the right, so that her face
appeared in profile. She was in extremely low evening-dress of an
aquamarine shade, flowered with gold. Her shoulders were sickle-shaped
and gleamed like the half-crescent of a young moon. From her throat,
which was full and white, hung a splendid string of tan-colored pearls.
But it was the slope of her jaw, the way her ears set back, and the
rounded strength of her head that gave to her that peculiarly alert
beauty. Her dark hair was drawn from off her forehead, making clear in
her features an expression of calm challenge. She was a woman who had
lived and not always happily. Her calmness was the quiet of almost
painful self-control. And her age---- With her atmosphere of experience,
it was certainly over thirty. She was not the woman to put back the
hands of time for any man.

"It can't be of Maisie," he thought, and yet he hoped. "But it can't be
of her," he insisted. "This woman is remote and uncapturable. She's done
with passion. She's tasted life to the full and the taste was bitter.
She has nothing left but her unquenchable pride, with which she tortures
herself: her pride not to submit, not to cry out, to stand always at
bay. That's all she has, unless----" And then, speaking aloud in his
effort to remember, "I know her. I'm positive. And yet----"

The door behind him opened. "This is nice of you, Lord Taborley.--Ah,
you were looking at Di! Most men do that when they visit me. I ought to
be jealous. But a word of warning; looking is as far as any of them
get."

Tabs found himself shaking hands with a woman who shared the features of
the woman in the portrait, but who differed from her in that she was
fair, lacked her alluring remoteness and had much more of youth to her
credit. Whereas the woman in the portrait looked uncapturable, Maisie's
charm lay in her accessibility--the genial promise she held out of being
willing and even eager to surrender. Her every tone and gesture
proclaimed her anxiety to find this world