. The sleeper seemed so apart
from everything there, from all the formality and stiffness of the ward.
To look at her swept away the languid, hollow feeling with which she had
come in; it made her think of the tors at home, when the wind was
blowing, and all was bare, and grand, and sometimes terrible. There was
something elemental in that still sleep. And the old lady in the next
led, with a brown wrinkled face and bright black eyes brimful of life,
seemed almost vulgar beside such remote tranquillity, while she was
telling Barbara that a little bunch of heather in the better half of a
soap-dish on the window-sill had come from Wales, because, as she
explained: "My mother was born in Stirling, dearie; so I likes a bit of
heather, though I never been out o' Bethnal Green meself."

But when Barbara again passed, the sleeping woman was sitting up, and
looked but a poor ordinary thing--her strange fragile beauty all
withdrawn.

It was a relief when Lady Valleys said:

"My dear, my Naval Bazaar at five-thirty; and while I'm there you must go
home and have a rest, and freshen yourself up for the evening. We dine
at Plassey House."

The Duchess of Gloucester's Ball, a function which no one could very well
miss, had been fixed for this late date owing to the Duchess's announced
desire to prolong the season and so help the hackney cabmen; and though
everybody sympathized, it had been felt by most that it would be simpler
to go away, motor up on the day of the Ball, and motor down again on the
following morning. And throughout the week by which the season was thus
prolonged, in long rows at the railway stations, and on their stands, the
hackney cabmen, unconscious of what was being done for them, waited,
patient as their horses. But since everybody was making this special
effort, an exceptionally large, exclusive, and brilliant company
reassembled at Gloucester House.

In the vast ballroom over the medley of entwined revolving couples,
punkahs had been fixed, to clear and freshen the languid air, and these
huge fans, moving with incredible slowness, drove a faint refreshing
draught down over the sea of white shirt-fronts and bare necks, and freed
the scent from innumerable flowers.

Late in the evening, close by one of the great clumps of bloom, a very
pretty woman stood talking to Bertie Caradoc. She was his cousin, Lily
Malvezin, sister of Geoffrey Winlow, and wife of a Liberal peer, a
charming creature, whose pi