bent, and she in the act of forcing
a recalcitrant hatpin through her hat--doing it under certain
disadvantages, as she held her gloves and her veil in one hand.

As she paused there, confronting the tall figure of the new-comer,
although it was obvious that her unpreparedness was not less than his
own, there was to the most acute eye nothing in the remotest degree
dramatic about the encounter--hardly more than a cool surprise, and yet
there was that which made Jean say, smiling--

'Oh, you know one another already?'

'Everybody in this part of the world knows Mr. Stonor,' the lady said,
'but he doesn't know me.'

'This is Miss Levering. You knew her father, didn't you?'

Even before Lady John had introduced them, the people in the garden
seemed not to be able to support the prospect of Miss Levering's
threatened monopoly of the lion. They swarmed in--Hermione Heriot and
Paul Filey appearing for the first time since church--they overflowed
into the Hall, while Jean Dunbarton, with artless enthusiasm, was
demanding of Miss Levering if the reason she knew Mr. Stonor was that
she had been hearing him speak.

'Yes,' the lady met his eyes, 'I was visiting some relations near
Dutfield. They took me to hear you.'

'Oh--the night the Suffragettes made their customary row----'

'They didn't attack _you_,' she reminded him.

'They will if we win the election!' he said, with a cynical
anticipation.

It was a mark of how far the Women's Cause had travelled that, although
there was no man there (except the ineffectual Farnborough)--no one to
speak of it even with tolerance, there was also no one, not even
Greatorex, who any longer felt the matter to be much of a joke. Here
again in this gathering was happening what the unprejudiced observer
was seeing in similar circumstances all over England. The mere mention
of Women's Suffrage in general society (rarest of happenings now)--that
topic which had been the prolific mother of so much merriment, bred in
these days but silence and constraint. The quickest-witted changed the
topic amid a general sense of grateful relief. The thing couldn't be
laughed at any longer, but it could still be pretended it wasn't there.

'You've come just in time to rescue me!' Mrs. Freddy said, sparkling at
Stonor.

'You don't appear to be in any serious danger,' he said.

'But I am, or I _was_! They were just insisting I should go upstairs and
change my frock.'

'Is there anybody here so di