If I had only known we were
to have had the pleasure of meeting you--Do you know, I think she is
looking decidedly better?"

His kindly expression as he rose expected a word of sisterly assent.
Meanwhile even Lady Grosville was paralyzed, and the words with which
she had meant to interpose failed on her lips.

Kitty, too, rose, looking round for something, which she seemed to find
in the face of William Ashe, for her eyes clung there.

"My sister," she repeated, in the same low, strained voice. "My sister
Alice? I--I don't know. I have never seen her."

* * * * *

Ashe could not remember afterwards precisely how the incident closed.
There was a bustle of departing guests, and from the midst of it Lady
Kitty slipped away. But as he came down-stairs in smoking trim, ten
minutes later, he overheard the injured Dean wrestling with his wife, as
she lit a candle for him on the landing.

"My dear, what did you look at me like that for? What did the child
mean? And what on <i>earth</i> is the matter?"

IV

After the ladies had gone to bed, on the night of Lady Kitty's
recitation, William Ashe stayed up till past midnight talking with old
Lord Grosville. When relieved of the presence of his women-kind, who
were apt either to oppress him, in the person of his wife, or to puzzle
him, in the persons of his daughters, Lord Grosville was not by any
means without value as a talker. He possessed that narrow but still most
serviceable fund of human experience which the English land-owner, while
our English tradition subsists, can hardly escape, if he will. As
guardsman, volunteer, magistrate, lord-lieutenant, member--for the sake
of his name and his acres--of various important commissions, as military
<i>attache</i> even, for a short space, to an important embassy, he had
acquired, by mere living, that for which his intellectual betters had
often envied him--a certain shrewdness, a certain instinct, as to both
men and affairs, which were often of more service to him than finer
brains to other persons. But, like most accomplishments, these also
brought their own conceit with them. Lord Grosville having, in his own
opinion, done extremely well without much book education himself, had
but little appreciation for it in others.

Nevertheless he rarely missed a chance of conversation with William
Ashe, not because the younger man, in spite of his past indolence, was
generally held to be both a