membered to smile. And it was without
a smile that she bore rapidly down upon them.

"Oh, Miss--Miss Hanbury," she said, "do come to lunch on Thursday next
at one-thirty--or is it two, Lord Lindfield? Yes, two. Lord Lindfield is
coming, and I hope one or two other friends."

"Why, that is charming of you," said Daisy. "I shall be delighted."

"And do persuade Lady Nottingham to come, will you not?" continued Mrs.
Streatham. "She is your aunt, is she not?"

Somehow the moment had passed, but Daisy, as she stood talking, felt
that something new had come to her. She had seen Tom Lindfield for a
moment in a new light: for that second she felt that she had never known
him before. He struck her differently, somehow, and it was that which
momentarily had frightened her, and caused her to make that light,
nonsensical reply. But next moment she saw that it was not he who had
altered, it was herself.

All this was very faint and undefined in her own mind. But it was
there.

CHAPTER VI.

Jeannie Halton, going up to her bedroom that night, felt very keenly
that ineffable sense of coming home which makes all the hours spent in
alien places seem dim and unreal. She could hardly believe that it was
she who had been so long away from so many friends, still less that it
was she who, a year ago, tired and weary, had gone southwards in
search of that minimum of health and peace which makes existence
tolerable. Yet that time abroad could never have become dim to her,
since it was there, in the winter spent in Rome, that her old
friendship with Victor Braithwaite had ripened into intimacy and burst
into love. Rome would always be knit into her life.

It was not only in affairs of the mind and affections that her
perception was acute. Like most highly-organized people, her body, her
fine material senses, were vivid messengers to her soul; and as she went
upstairs she contrasted with a strong sense of content her purely
physical surroundings with those in which she had lived for the last
forty-eight hours. For two days and nights she had been hurried across
Europe, over the jolt and rattle of the racing wheels; by day the
blurred landscape, wreathed in engine-smoke, had streamed by her; by
night she had seen nothing but the dull, stuffed walls of her sleeping
compartment, and it was an exquisite physical pleasure to have the firm,
unshaken floor underfoot, to be surrounded by the appointments of a
beautiful house, to be able