being intent upon Freddy's
remarks, was levelling at Mrs. Freddy the critical eye that says, 'Now I
shall see if I can determine just how miserably conscious you are that
dinner's unpardonably late, everybody starving, and since you've only
just rung, that you have at least eight minutes still to fill up before
you'll hear that you are "served."' Lady Whyteleafe leaned against the
back of the little periwinkle damask sofa, and waited to see Mrs.
Freddy carry off these last minutes of suspense by an affectation of
great good spirits.

But the lady under the social microscope knew a trick worth two of that.
She could turn more than one mishap to account.

'Oh, Freddy! Oh, Lady Whyteleafe! I've just gone and said the most
awful, dreadful, appalling thing! Oh, I should like to creep under the
sofa and die!'

'What's up?' demanded Mr. Freddy, with an air of relief at being
reinforced.

'I've been talking to Vida Levering and that funereal sister of hers.'

'Oh, Mrs. Fox-Moore!' said Lady Whyteleafe, obviously disappointed.
'She's a step-sister, isn't she?'

'Yes, yes. Oh, I wish she'd never stepped over my threshold!'

'Why?' said Mr. Freddy, sticking in his eyeglass.

'Don't, Freddy. Don't look at her. Oh, I wish I were dead!'

'What _have_ you been doing? She looks as if she wished _she_ were
dead.'

'That's nothing. She always looks like that,' Lady Whyteleafe assured
the pair.

'Yes, and she makes it a great favour to come. "I seldom go into
society," she writes in her stiff little notes; and you're reminded that
way, without her actually setting it down, that she devotes herself to
good works.'

'Perhaps she doesn't know what else to do with all that money,' said the
lady of the pearls.

'_She_ hasn't got a penny piece.'

'Oh, is it all his? I thought the Leverings were rather well off.'

'Yes, but the money came through the second wife, Vida's mother. Oh, I
hate that Fox-Moore woman!' Mrs. Freddy laughed ruefully. 'And I'm sure
her husband is a great deal too good for her. But how _could_ I have
done it!'

'You haven't told us yet.'

'They asked me who was late, and I said Dick Farnborough, and that I
hoped he hadn't forgotten, for I had Hermione Heriot here on purpose to
meet him. And I told Vida about the Heriots trying to marry Hermione to
that old Colonel Redding.'

'Oh, can't they bring it off?' said Lady Whyteleafe.

'I've been afraid they would. "It's so dreadful," I said, "to see a
f