way to avoid giving a reply, and,
indeed, she did not wish to, for she believed that the policy of the
last two days had ripened.

"Yes, Lord Lindfield?" she said.

"Am I ever going to have a word with you again?" he asked.

Jeannie leant over the banisters; she had already gone up some six
stairs.

"But by all means," she said. "I--I too have missed our talks. Things
have gone wrong a little? Let us try after dinner to put them straight.
We shall find an opportunity."

"Thanks," he said; and it was not only the word that thanked her.

Jeannie's maid must have been a first-rate hand at throwing, if by that
simple process she produced in a quarter of an hour that exquisite and
finished piece of apparelling which appeared at half-past eight. True,
it was Jeannie who wore the jewels and the dress, and her hair it was
that rose in those black billows above her shapely head; and the dress,
it may be said, was worthy of the wearer. Still, if this was to be
arrived at by throwing things, the maid, it was generally felt, must be
a competent hurler.

It so happened that everybody was extremely punctual that night, and
Jeannie, though quite sufficiently so, the last to appear. Lady
Nottingham was even just beginning to allude to the necessary quarter of
an hour when she came in.

Lord Lindfield saw her first; he was talking to Daisy. But he turned
from her in the middle of a sentence, and said,--

"By Gad!"

It might have been by Gad, but it was by Worth. Four shades of grey, and
pearls. Mrs. Beaumont distinctly thought that this was not the sort of
dress to dash into the faces of a quiet country party. It was like
letting off rockets at a five o'clock tea. Only a woman could dissect
the enormity of it; men just stared.

"I know I am not more than one minute late," she said. "Lord Lindfield,
Alice has told me to lead you to your doom, which is to take me
in.--Alice, they have told us, haven't they?"

CHAPTER XXII.

It seemed to Lord Lindfield that dinner was over that night with unusual
swiftness, and that they had scarcely sat down when they rose again for
the women to leave the room. Yet, short though it seemed, it had been a
momentous hour, for in that hour all the perplexity and the anger that
had made his very blood so bitter to him during these last two days had
been charmed away from him, and instead, love, like some splendid fever
of the spirit, burned there.

Until Jeannie had been friendly, b