dge of secrets, a natural intimacy with the
inaccessible. It was like Harry to show no signs of being impressed; but
very shrewd eyes were upon him, and his impassivity met with amused
approval since it stopped short of inattention. She broke it down at
last by speaking of Addie Tristram.

"The most fascinating creature in the world," she said. "I knew her as a
little girl. I knew her up to the time of your birth almost. After that
she hardly left Blent, did she? At least she never came to London. You
travelled, I know."

"Were you ever at Blent?" he asked.

"No, Mr Tristram."

He frowned for a moment; it was odd not to be able to ask people there,
just too as he was awaking to the number of people there were in the
world worth asking.

"There never was anybody in the world like her, and there never will
be," Lady Evenswood went on.

"I used to think that; but I was wrong." The smile that Mina Zabriska
knew came on his face.

"You were wrong? Who's like her then?"

"Her successor. My cousin Cecily's very like her."

Lady Evenswood was more struck by the way he spoke than by the meaning
of what he said. She wanted to say "Bravo," and to pat him on the back;
he had avoided so entirely any hesitation or affectation in naming his
cousin--Addie Tristram's successor who had superseded him.

"She talks and moves and sits and looks at you in the same way. I was
amazed to see it." He had said not a word of this to anybody since he
left Blent. Lady Evenswood, studying him very curiously, began to make
conjectures about the history of the affair, also about what lay behind
her visitor's composed face; there was a hint of things suppressed in
his voice. But he had the bridle on himself again in a moment. "Very
curious these likenesses are," he ended with a shrug.

She decided that he was remarkable, for a boy of his age, bred in the
country, astonishing. She had heard her father describe Pitt at
twenty-one and Byron at eighteen. Without making absurd comparisons,
there was, all the same, something of that precocity of manhood here,
something also of the arrogance that the great men had exhibited. She
was very glad that she had sent for him.

"I don't want to be impertinent," she said (she had not meant to make
even this much apology), "but perhaps an old woman may tell you that she
is very sorry for--for this turn in your fortunes, Mr Tristram."

"You're very kind. It was all my own doing, you know. Nobody could hav