llpeace's eyes flew deliciously down his figure.

"Not often," she said; and turning rather markedly once more to Stephen:
"Have you any special case that you are interested in, Mr. Dallison?"

Stephen consulted Cecilia with one of those masculine half-glances so
discreet that Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace intercepted it without looking up.
She found it rather harder to catch Cecilia's reply, but she caught it
before Stephen did. It was, 'You'd better wait, perhaps,' conveyed by a
tiny raising of the left eyebrow and a slight movement to the right of
the lower lip. Putting two and two together, she felt within her bones
that they were thinking of the little model. And she remembered the
interesting moment in the omnibus when that attractive-looking man had
got out so hastily.

There was no danger whatever from Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace feeling
anything. The circle in which she moved did not now talk scandal, or,
indeed, allude to matters of that sort without deep sympathy; and in the
second place she was really far too good a fellow, with far too dear a
love of life, to interfere with anybody else's love of it. At the same
time it was interesting.

"That little model, now," she said, "what about her?"

"Is that the girl I saw?" broke in Mr. Purcey, with his accustomed
shrewdness.

Stephen gave him the look with which he was accustomed to curdle the
blood of persons who gave evidence before Commissions.

'This fellow is impossible,' he thought.

The little black bees flying below Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace's dark hair,
done in the Early Italian fashion, tranquilly sucked honey from Stephen's
face.

"She seemed to me," she answered, "such a very likely type."

"Ah!" murmured Stephen, "there would be, I suppose, a danger---" And he
looked angrily at Cecilia.

Without ceasing to converse with Mr. Purcey and Signor Egregio Pozzi, she
moved her left eye upwards. Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace understood this to
mean: 'Be frank, and guarded!' Stephen, however, interpreted it
otherwise. To him it signified: 'What the deuce do you look at me for?'
And he felt justly hurt. He therefore said abruptly:

"What would you do in a case like that?"

Mrs. Tallents Smallpeace, sliding her face sideways, with a really
charming little smile, asked softly:

"In a case like what?"

And her little eyes fled to Thyme, who had slipped into the room, and was
whispering to her mother.

Cecilia rose.

"You know my daughter," she sa