een robbed, nor any Tyrian
rose-garden, for the glory of Miss Dobson's cheeks. Her neck was
imitation-marble. Her hands and feet were of very mean proportions. She
had no waist to speak of.

Yet, though a Greek would have railed at her asymmetry, and an
Elizabethan have called her "gipsy," Miss Dobson now, in the midst of
the Edwardian Era, was the toast of two hemispheres. Late in her 'teens
she had become an orphan and a governess. Her grandfather had refused
her appeal for a home or an allowance, on the ground that he would not
be burdened with the upshot of a marriage which he had once forbidden
and not yet forgiven. Lately, however, prompted by curiosity or by
remorse, he had asked her to spend a week or so of his declining
years with him. And she, "resting" between two engagements--one at
Hammerstein's Victoria, N.Y.C., the other at the Folies Bergeres,
Paris--and having never been in Oxford, had so far let bygones be
bygones as to come and gratify the old man's whim.

It may be that she still resented his indifference to those early
struggles which, even now, she shuddered to recall. For a governess'
life she had been, indeed, notably unfit. Hard she had thought it, that
penury should force her back into the school-room she was scarce out of,
there to champion the sums and maps and conjugations she had never
tried to master. Hating her work, she had failed signally to pick up
any learning from her little pupils, and had been driven from house
to house, a sullen and most ineffectual maiden. The sequence of her
situations was the swifter by reason of her pretty face. Was there a
grown-up son, always he fell in love with her, and she would let his
eyes trifle boldly with hers across the dinner-table. When he offered
her his hand, she would refuse it--not because she "knew her place,"
but because she did not love him. Even had she been a good teacher, her
presence could not have been tolerated thereafter. Her corded trunk,
heavier by another packet of billets-doux and a month's salary in
advance, was soon carried up the stairs of some other house.

It chanced that she came, at length, to be governess in a large family
that had Gibbs for its name and Notting Hill for its background. Edward,
the eldest son, was a clerk in the city, who spent his evenings in the
practice of amateur conjuring. He was a freckled youth, with hair that
bristled in places where it should have lain smooth, and he fell in love
with Zuleika