. It was known, too, that the spell was in no
danger of being rudely broken. The same tender but festive radiance
would bathe the hospitable board of the great oak dining-room below.

And why were they not processing thither?

'Is it my sister who is late?' Miss Levering asked, turning her slim
neck in that deliberate way of hers to look about the room.

'No; your sister is over there, talking to---- Oh--a----' Mrs. Freddy,
having looked round to refresh her memory, was fain to slur over the
fact that Mrs. Fox-Moore was in the corner by the pierced screen, not
talking to any one, but, on the contrary, staring dark-visaged, gloomy,
sibylline, at a leaflet advertising a charity concert, a document
conspicuously left by Mrs. Freddy on a little table. On her way to
rescue Mrs. Fox-Moore from her desert island of utter loneliness, Mrs.
Freddy saw Sir William Haycroft, the newly-made Cabinet Minister, rather
pointedly making his escape from a tall, keen-looking, handsome woman
wearing eye-glasses and iron-grey hair dressed commandingly.

Without a qualm Mrs. Freddy abandoned Mrs. Fox-Moore to prolonged exile,
in order to soothe the ruffled minister.

'I think,' she said, pausing in front of the great man and delicately
offering him an opportunity to make any predilection known--'I think you
know every one here.'

Haycroft muttered in his beard--but his eyes had lit upon the new face.

'Who's that?' he said; but his tone added, 'Not that it matters.'

'You don't know her? Well, that's a proof of how you've neglected your
friends since the new Government came in. But you really mean it--that
nobody has introduced you to Miss Levering yet? What _is_ Freddy
thinking about!'

'Dinner!' replied a voice at her elbow with characteristic laconism, and
Freddy Tunbridge pulled out his watch.

'Oh, give them five minutes more,' said his wife, indulgently.

'That's not a daughter of old Sir Hervey?' pursued the other man, his
eyes still on the young woman talking to Lady John and the foreign
ambassador.

'Yes; go on,' said Mrs. Freddy, with as cloudless a brow as though she
had no need to manufacture conversation while the dinner was being kept
waiting. 'Go on! They _all_ do it.'

'Do what?' demanded the great man, suspiciously.

'"Why haven't they seen her before" comes next. Then the next time you
and I meet in the country or find ourselves alone in a crush, you'll be
saying, "What's her story? Why hasn't a woman like th